Twenty years ago – and just two months and a day after the traumatic events of 9/11 – another tragic plane crash sent shockwaves through a still on-edge New York City.
American Airlines Flight 587, a regular direct flight from John F Kennedy International Airport to Las Americas International Airport in Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic, went down shortly after takeoff, smashing into the Queens neighbourhood of Belle Harbour on the Rockaway Peninsula.
All 251 passengers on board were killed, 90 per cent of them Dominicans heading home to visit family, as were all nine crew members and five bystanders on the ground.
Initially feared to be another al-Qaeda terror attack, the incident of 12 November 2001 was later ruled to have been an accident by the investigating National Transportation Safety Board, which concluded that pilot error and a design flaw were jointly to blame.
The officials’ verdict was that the aircraft’s first officer, Sten Molin, 34, who had been flying the Airbus A300B4-605R at the time, had overused the rudder controls in response to wake turbulence from Japan Airlines Flight 47, which had taken off from JFK moments before 587.
His overcompensation only served to place stress on the plane’s vertical stabiliser, the resulting sideslip causing it to separate from the aircraft and plummet into Jamaica Bay, swiftly followed by the plane’s engines, likewise under duress from the intense forces working against it.
Out of control, 587 dived into a flat spin and slammed into the ground at Newport Avenue and Beach 131st Street.
The disaster was devastating for all New Yorkers but particularly for the city’s Dominican emigrant community, many of whose members lived in and around Manhattan’s Washington Heights area.
“Every Dominican in New York has either taken that flight or knows someone who has,” Belkis Lora, a relative of one of the victims, told The Guardian at the time.
“It gets you there early. At home, there are songs…