Turbulence can kill

But it wasnt a Boeing 757 that American 587 followed out of JFK on Monday morning, it was its much bigger brother, the 747, the largest commercial plane ever built, in the livery of Japan Airlines and bound nonstop for Tokyo with a full load of fuel. It weighed about 800,000 pounds. It was heavy, slow and climbing. The American A300, about half its size, was following closely behind and beneath. Ahead of it, the JAL 747 was spinning its invisible tornadoes like a huge, red-and-white spider. Did American somehow creep too close?

Maybe. Nobody knows for sure. And if so, still, could the wake have been powerful enough to destroy the tail of Flight 587, or snap off those truck-size GE turbofans? Smaller -- much smaller -- aircraft have crashed as the result of wake turbulence. Only this past summer a 10-passenger Cessna in the colors of Cape Air skidded across a runway at Boston after, it is believed, being kicked upside down by just such an encounter. But never a large jet. Never an A300.

When it all shakes out, though, it seems there are never any nevers when it comes to aviation disasters. From lightning strikes to wings falling off -- yes its happened, even if only once. Its worth noting, too, that in 1994 this very same plane, which wore the tail registration N10453, made an unscheduled landing in the Caribbean after an inflight knock-around when it struck some rather rough air at 35,000 feet. Could this incident have resulted in a structural weakness, cracks or fatigue, that was heretofore undetected, and needed only the right set of circumstances to manifest itself tragically? Its possible. In 1985, in the second-worst air disaster in history, a JAL 747, ironically enough, crashed near Mt. Fuji when an aft pressure bulkhead ruptured. A rush of air from the passenger compartment surged into the unpressurized tail, knocking away part of the rudder and severing hydraulic lines. It was later discovered that a hard landing and faulty repairs, made some seven years earlier, had left the bulkhead vulnerable.

But if the big American Airbus fell victim to an unusual and unprecedented event, I suspect it found its way, as so many crashed planes have, to that one-in-a-million convergence of "ifs." Two hundred and sixty-five people suddenly won the lottery they never wanted to win.

Flying is inherently dangerous, and will always be so. But also, as the statistics show, it is the least dangerous of all our tried-and-true ways of getting around. The unfortunate end of American 587 will not skew the numbers. In fact, neither Mohammed Atta and his henchman, nor all the wake turbulence and bad luck in the world, will likely change a thing.

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