FAA releases tapes of American Airlines flight that crashed after takeoff from JFK

Wednesday, February 20th 2002, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

WASHINGTON (AP) _ Doomed American Airlines Flight 587 took off without problems, though pilots were warned of turbulence from the plane that preceded it in the air, newly released air traffic control tapes show.

Tapes of conversations between air traffic controllers and crew of the American Airlines Airbus A300-600 showed no problems until a voice is heard saying that the plane was descending.

The tapes, released Wednesday by the Federal Aviation Administration, do not indicate whether the voice was that of a controller or a member of the flight crew. The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the Nov. 12 crash.

``Tower look to the south, there's an aircraft crashing,'' came the message, at 9:16:13 a.m. EST, shortly after the plane took off from Kennedy Airport in New York.

Thirty-six seconds later, a controller called Flight 587 and told the pilots the tower was not receiving signals from the plane's transponder, an automatic beacon that allows the plane to be tracked. In the next two minutes the controller tried three more times to raise the pilots but got no answer.

At 9:18 a.m. the pilots of another American plane, Flight 686, reported they saw black smoke. ``It's a huge fire, a tremendous amount of black smoke,'' they told the tower.

The Airbus A300-600 crashed Nov. 12 shortly after taking off. All 260 people on board and five on the ground were killed. The plane hit wake turbulence from a jumbo jet that took off before it, and its tail fin and engines fell off before the crash.

The cause of the accident is still under investigation.

Earlier this month, the NTSB said certain sharp rudder movements could cause a plane's tail to come off. Board investigators also are looking at whether the tail, made of a nonmetallic composite material, had some unseen damage that weakened it.