American Airlines Flight 587 Crash (National Geographic)

The American Airlines Flight 587 was a regularly scheduled international passenger flight from John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York to Las Américas International Airport in Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic's capital. On November 12, 2001, the Airbus A300B4-605R flying the route crashed shortly after takeoff into the Belle Harbor neighbourhood of Queens, a borough of New York City. All 260 people aboard the plane (251 passengers and 9 crew members) were killed, along with 5 people on the ground. Aside from being the second-deadliest aviation incident to happen on U.S. soil, it is also the third-deadliest aviation incident to happen on an Airbus A300.

As a result of the location of the accident and the fact that it occurred two months and one day after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in Manhattan, fears of another terrorist attack were sparked. As a result of wake turbulence from a Japan Airlines (JAL) Boeing 747-400 taking off minutes before the disaster, the first officer overused rudder controls in response to the wake turbulence, according to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). In addition to the vertical stabilizer snapping off the plane, the two engines separated from intense forces before impact due to the first officer's aggressive use of the rudder controls.

The crash occurred two months and one day after the September 11 attacks in New York, which forced the evacuation of several major buildings, including the Empire State Building and the United Nations Headquarters. In the months after the crash, rumors circulated that the plane had been destroyed in a terrorist plot, with a shoe bomb similar to the one found on Richard Reid. In May 2002, a Kuwaiti national named Mohammed Jabarah agreed to cooperate with investigators as part of a plea bargain. Among the details Jabarah gave authorities was a claim made to Jabarah by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's lieutenant, who told Jabarah that Reid and Abderraouf Jdey had both been enlisted by the al-Qaeda chief to carry out identical shoe-bombing plots as part of a second wave of attacks against the United States. According to this lieutenant, Jdey's bomb had successfully blown up Flight 587, while Reid's attempt had been foiled.

According to a May 2002 memo from the Canadian government, Jdey was implicated in the crash, but the source of the information - Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's lieutenant - was not reliable. According to information contained in the memo, Jdey — a naturalized Canadian citizen — was to use his own Canadian passport to board the flight. While American Airlines' passenger manifest did indicate citizens boarding with passports from the United States, the Dominican Republic, Taiwan, France,[d] Haiti, and Israel, no passengers boarded using a Canadian passport. According to NTSB spokesman Ted Lopatkiewicz, the weight of the memo's veracity was put into question, as no evidence of a terrorist traveling on board was found. The evidence suggested that the aircraft was brought down after a piece of the empennage, "the vertical fin, came off", while it did not indicate "any kind of event in the cabin."