Page "American Airlines Flight 587" Paragraph 1

The accident took place two months after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in Manhattan.

Several factors, such as the date, time, aircraft size, airline, eyewitness accounts, and location in New York, raised concerns that the crash was caused by another terrorist attack.

According to Northeast Intelligence Network, Al-Qaeda listed the crash among its successes, and a Canadian militant cooperating with authorities suggested that it had been brought down with a shoe bomb.

Nonetheless, terrorism was officially ruled out as the cause by the National Transportation Safety Board, which instead attributed the disaster to the first officer's overuse of rudder controls in response to wake turbulence released by a Japan Airlines Boeing 747-400.