Investigation into Flight 587 Crash Has Many Unanswered Questions
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT.  THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED. LEON HARRIS, CNN ANCHOR: Getting back to the crash in New York. Obviously, we know, now, more about that than we did in the minutes and hours after it happened. But as CNN's Miles O'Brien reports this morning, it's going to likely be months, many months, before we really know what happened.</s>MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR (voice-over): It could take months for federal crash investigators to write the final report on what happened during American 587's brief flight. But here are some of the questions they will undoubtedly consider: Could it have been a bird strike? Since the dawn of aviation, collisions between birds and airplanes have destroyed 40 aircraft and killed at least 100 people. This Northwest Airlines plane lost a piece of an engine after some birds were sucked in. The plane landed safely, and no one was hurt. And, in fact, that is how it normally turns out. Today's jet engines are designed to ingest birds and keep flying, but if an engine sucked in a very large bird, say a goose or even a gaggle, it could cause a more calamitous failure.</s>JOHN WILEY, AIRLINE PILOT: A number of years ago, many years ago, here in Atlanta, a small private jet was taking off from one of the local airports here and ran into a flock of birds, and the airplane went down, because just the number of birds that were ingested into the engine.</s>O'BRIEN: Could a critical engine part have simply failed? The titanium turbine blades spin inside a jet engine at better than 30,000 revolutions per minute with razor-thin tolerances. The engines are designed to contain blades that disintegrate, but on occasion, the speeding shrapnel can break through the engine cowling.</s>WILEY: There was an MD-88 uncontained engine failure down in Pensacola, I think it was, a couple of years ago, shards of the engine came through the aircraft. They do happen. They are rare.</s>O'BRIEN: If it was an uncontained catastrophic engine failure, what damage did the shrapnel cause? In 1989, the center engine on a United DC-10 failed, severing the hydraulic lines. The crew managed this crash landing in Sioux City, Iowa, using only the power settings on the remaining engines for control; 175 people survived.</s>WILEY: And so, they were able to fly the airplane only by using differential thrust technique that was later on attempted in simulators, and again, according to the reports, not very many people were successful.</s>O'BRIEN: Could the engine simply have fallen off? That, too, has happened before. In 1979, an American Airlines DC-10 lost its engine shortly after departure from Chicago's O'Hare Airport. Investigators determined the engine was not correctly attached to the wing, and that the crew was not properly trained to respond.</s>ART CORNELIUS, AIRLINE PILOT: You asked if an airplane could fly losing an engine. Routinely. If it could fly having physically lost the engine and whatever attendant damage may be associated with that, that is something they're going to have to figure out when they investigate this accident.</s>O'BRIEN: What about a bomb in the cargo hold? That's what brought down Pan Am 103 over Scotland. But would a bomb in the belly of the airplane cause an engine to drop off the wing? Our experts are skeptical.</s>CORNELIUS: I can't think of a way that it could be expected to detach an engine from the air frame, because that engine sits out there several feet, and by the time the force of the explosion blasts its way through the fuselage structure, you're not going to have a lot of force left.</s>O'BRIEN: And finally, could it have been a heat-seeking missile? Witnesses, who gave detailed accounts of the crash, did not report seeing a distinctive streak upward toward the plane, and the wreckage does not bear the hallmarks of such an attack.</s>MAJOR-GENERAL DON SHEPPERD (RET.), CNN MILITARY ANALYST: It's highly unlikely that it would bring down an aircraft the size of an Airbus. It would take out the engine, but airplanes are designed with the idea of losing engines and having engines come apart. I find that very, very unlikely that this is a possibility in this case.</s>O'BRIEN: Whatever the cause, it seems likely investigators will determine it. At least one of the data recorders has already been recovered, and it undoubtedly will provide key clues. Miles O'Brien, CNN.