Tapes Show No Danger in Flight 587’s Takeoff, Then a Call Reports Fireball

Minutes after American Airlines Flight 587 took off without incident from New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport last November, ground controllers got an urgent radio transmission.

“Tower, look . . . to the south. There’s an aircraft crashing,” said a male voice, captured on a tape released Wednesday by the Federal Aviation Administration. The voice apparently belonged to the unidentified pilot of another plane in the air nearby.

“Say again?” a controller at Kennedy immediately queried, seeking confirmation of what she had just heard. There had been no warning of any trouble.

“An aircraft just crashed south of the field. . . . Affirm a fireball,” came the terse reply.

The FAA tapes contain no hint of what snapped the tail fin off the A300 jetliner on the clear morning of Nov. 12. The ensuing crash killed all 260 people aboard and five people on the ground in a residential neighborhood in New York. The recordings depict the efforts of FAA controllers, other flight crews and police helicopter pilots to determine what went so swiftly and dreadfully wrong.

The ground control tapes are different from the cockpit voice recorder, which preserves conversations between the pilots and remains in the hands of investigators at the National Transportation Safety Board. The agency is trying to determine whether a structural or mechanical defect, a mistake by the pilots or some combination of factors caused the crash. The safety board did not find a problem with the controllers’ performance.

No audible stress could be detected in the voice of the Flight 587 pilot as the plane climbed beyond 5,000 feet. Ground controllers had alerted the pilots to beware of the wake of a Boeing 747 ahead of them. The warning itself was routine, and there was no indication from the flight deck that the pilots of Flight 587 encountered unusual turbulence.

Co-pilot Sten Molin was flying the takeoff, so Capt. Edward States would have been handling communication with the ground. But the FAA transcript did not identify which pilot was speaking. The last words from the cockpit were in aviation jargon, an acknowledgment of standard navigation instructions from controllers.

Shortly after 9:16 a.m.--barely 30 seconds from that last transmission--the first warning of a crash was received at the Kennedy tower.

Less than 20 seconds later, a controller handling outbound planes from an FAA facility on Long Island noticed that Flight 587 was no longer on his radar screen. “American 587 heavy,” he radioed. “I’m not receiving your transponder.” The transponder is a device on the aircraft that automatically broadcasts identifying information to the ground and to other planes. “Heavy” is controller jargon for a large jetliner.

Meanwhile, at the Kennedy tower, a frantic search was underway. “You missing any of your departures?” an unidentified male voice asked the tower controller.

“We’re trying to figure it out now, sir,” she responded. “We’re trying to see if we’re missing any aircraft. Stand by.”

The pilot of Delta Flight 79 airborne nearby radioed the Kennedy tower: “It was a heavy jet, anyway.”

“It was a heavy jet, sir?” asked the controller.

“Yeah, it looked like it,” the pilot replied.

The controller on Long Island tried repeatedly to contact Flight 587 on his radio. Three New York police helicopters radioed that they were heading for the crash site. The controller at Kennedy took over the job of keeping the helicopters at a safe distance from each other and other aircraft. And she halted further takeoffs.

Another American Airlines jetliner radioed the control facility on Long Island. American Flight 686 had taken off next in line after Flight 587.

“OK, just to let you know we saw a huge . . . tremendous amount of black smoke,” said the Flight 686 pilot.

“It’s about five miles behind us,” he continued. “It’s on the land, and it’s . . . tremendous, like it’s a huge fire, a tremendous amount of black smoke. Kennedy tower would probably be able to see that with no problem.”

At Kennedy, the tower controller was still trying to call Flight 587.

Final confirmation came from the pilot of a small private plane, a Beechcraft Baron. “What do you see off to your left?” the controller on Long Island asked him.

“A big column of rising brown smoke,” said the pilot. He kept calling in descriptions. “It’s a big, intense fire down there,” he said.

“OK,” answered another controller on Long Island. “We’ve got helicopters there.”