A-300 Airbus down in Queens

Well, hopefully this time it's not a terrorist attack but I guess we will see. So far the signs are that it's not.

www.cnn.com (http://www.cnn.com)

Looks like an engine problem (looks like one fell off at takeoff) not any terrorist attack.

I am still looking forwarded to getting on a plane next week to go down to Florida for vacation.

God Bless America

Scott

I head about it on the radio (in the car) and stopped at Best Buy to see TV coverage. Wow!!! All that fire and smoke, the last reports I head said 6 buildings/houses were totaled. NTSB and ATF and almost 100% sure that this incident is NOT terrorist related.

Steve

My guess at this point is that it was a very unfortunate accident, and possibly negligence from a maintenance standpoint. The engine that landed separately from the plane does not appear to show evidence of having been "blown off." The "experts" have emphasized all morning how a plane can fly perfectly fine after an engine falls off, although it is less often that one of them admits that having an engine fall of during takeoff is more of a catastrophic situation. I am NOT an expert in aircraft, but my wife WAS the daughter of one. Her father started working for Douglas during WW2, and the last project he was involved in was the DC10. When the DC10 crashed in Chicago in 1979 after an engine fell of on takeoff he told me the most dangerous time in a flight is takeoff. If an engine comes off at that time tremendous forces send the plane into a corkscrew, on its back, into the ground. Few pilots have the ability, or the room/time to counter the disaster. If the engine falls of when you are cruising at 30,000 feet, the plane is doing just that, cruising, loafing along. The same forces are not pushed to extremes. The pilot has 30,000 feet to recover, with the corresponding time. When the plane is at hundreds of feet, they have little space and time to react. The DC10 lost its engine because a maintanence crew reinstalled the engine precisely the way McDonnell-Douglas had instructed them not to. They did the the easy way, not the right way. They fractured the mounting plate by using a forklift to jam the engine onto the wing. I heard an "expert" this morning say he was just sure that the same kind of thing couldn't have happened this time. Perhaps.

Dc10's, L1011's and MD11's all had a problem related to the way engines were secured. A few lost engines in flight without catastrophic results. One landed in the desert near Phoenix and another one lost an engine over New Mexico. I believe that it was determined that the wrong grade of mount bolt was used when the engines were rebuilt.