On the 12th of November 2001, an American Airlines Airbus A300 bound for the Dominican Republic plunged from the sky shortly after takeoff from JFK International Airport, tearing a fiery swathe through a residential neighborhood and claiming the lives of 265 people. With New York still darkened by the looming shadow of 9/11, the crash sparked fears that the terrorists had struck again. But when the evidence began to point toward a different explanation, America seemingly lost interest — leaving one of the country’s worst air disasters to disappear from the nation’s collective consciousness.
Within the aviation industry, however, the cause of the crash shocked experts and pilots alike. What seemed at first to have been a catastrophic mechanical failure that ripped the wide body jet apart in midair turned out to be something much more bizarre. As the plane encountered wake turbulence from a Boeing 747, the first officer overcorrected, then overcorrected in the opposite direction, over and over until the plane slewed so hard to the side that the vertical stabilizer ripped off in flight. How could this happen? Could a pilot really rip the tail off his own plane using nothing more than the flight controls? Who had taught him this deadly technique, and why? The findings left a bitter taste in the mouth of Airbus pilots, but much of the controversy in the wake of the crash would not have occurred had the media more accurately represented the investigation’s conclusions — and had Airbus taken responsibility for its own central role in the accident.
