Two months and one day after the terrorist attack that claimed life in lower Manhattan, New Yorkers experienced firsthand how wrong the old wisdom that lightning never strikes twice is wrong. A little before 260:587 a.m. Monday, a passenger plane crashed into a residential neighborhood in Queens, just a few miles from the ruins of the World Trade Center. None of the XNUMX passengers and crew on scheduled flight XNUMX to Santo Domingo survived. On the ground, six people are missing in the fire that engulfed a dozen family houses, while twenty people were admitted to the hospital due to acute smoke poisoning.
DAN BOTTLE: Naturally, everyone immediately thought it was a terrorist attack, and if Al Qaeda wanted to strike New York again, it would have been hard to choose a better date. November 587th is American Veterans Day - something like our Day of Fighters - and in addition, the session of the United Nations General Assembly is underway, which usually includes a large number of high-ranking guests from all over the world (our Minister of Foreign Affairs Svilanović also happened to be in New York). However, already around noon, it became almost certain that this time the cause of the plane crash was a technical error on one of the engines. Based on the statements of several eyewitnesses, the engine detached from the plane immediately after takeoff, after which the ill-fated Flight XNUMX ended in Queens. It's about a plane erbas 300, more than ten years old, from a series that is no longer produced.
General Electric's engines on this type of aircraft already have a bad reputation - in the last few years there have been several cases of "spontaneous detachment", although without human casualties. Airbus is, of course, able to fly with one engine, but the one that fell off damaged the hydraulic system, without which the plane cannot be steered.
The black box and the device that records conversations in the cockpit were found in relatively good condition not far from the accident site, and the first results of the investigation indicate that no irregularities were recorded during the short flight. Investigative authorities also emphasize that there were no suspicious persons on the list of passengers, which means no one with an Arabic name and surname, and that all luggage went through enhanced security control before the flight.
Most of the dead passengers are American citizens originally from the Dominican Republic, members of a community that numbers ten thousand people in New York. Given that Santo Domingo is only a three-hour flight from New York, many took advantage of the holiday to visit relatives in their old homeland. The plane, which normally operates regularly on that route, was full of holes, and how popular flight 587 was is evidenced by the fact that it was sung in a cheerful Caribbean song with the same title, which was a hit in the Dominican Republic a few years ago. The plane crash saddened New York's Dominicans, who flocked to an information center in Manhattan on Monday to hear news of their loved ones. "It was terrible," testifies an employee of the airline company. "People were crying, pulling their hair and banging their fists on the walls." We had to call security to separate them into smaller groups."
LUCK U ACCIDENTS: The relatively small number of victims in Queens can be explained by a series of almost incredibly fortunate circumstances. First of all, the neighborhood where the plane crashed consists mostly of low, one-story wooden houses, which are often found in the suburbs of smaller American cities, but are an exception in New York. If the plane had crashed into one of the numerous solitaires, the death toll would have been much higher. Then, the fact that the plane fell almost vertically, instead of at a sharp angle like the hijacked planes of two months ago, caused the fire to spread over a relatively small area. Although the plane fell in the immediate vicinity of the gas station, miraculously there was no explosion and the pump remained undamaged. And finally, again miraculously, most of the fuel from the plane itself leaked out during the fall and did not catch fire, as evidenced by the intense smell of kerosene that can be felt throughout Queens. There is, of course, a theory according to which the pilot managed to drain the fuel from the tank before hitting the ground, but most experts agree that there was simply no time for such a thing in those few seconds between the engine failure and the crash.
However, all these happy circumstances can hardly console the residents of the aforementioned neighborhood called Rockaway, which is located right next to the beach sung in the song of the same name by the Ramones. Rockaway is mostly populated by police officers and firefighters, who died in large numbers on 11/XNUMX. Seventy-five of the three hundred or so firefighters killed in the attack on the World Trade Center lived in Rockaway, and the local priest has been holding obelisks virtually non-stop for the past two months - interrupted by a plane crash in the middle of a memorial to another firefighter. "This is like an aftershock after a big earthquake," said Rockaway Congressman Anthony Weiner. "It couldn't have happened in a worse place."
The tragedy of Flight 587 brought additional collateral damage, causing an immediate drop in stock markets and further losses for airline companies. The XNUMXth of September pushed the otherwise shaky American economy into recession, and the most damaged were the airline companies around the world, which even before the latest tragedy recorded a record drop in traffic. After this it will be quite some time before people want to fly again.
