Flight 587 Pilots Lost Control of Plane in Less Than 2 Minutes

N E W   Y O R K, Nov. 13 -- A "rattling" noise was heard in the ill-fated American Airlines Flight 587 seconds before pilots lost control of the plane, crash investigators said today.

National Transportation Safety Board investigators, releasing a preliminary timeline of doomed American Airlines Flight 587 this evening, said they are making significant progress in Monday morning's crash, which killed at least 262 people.

The airliner went down less than three minutes after takeoff, breaking up over a peninsula that stretches between Jamaica Bay and the Atlantic Ocean, at the southern edge of Queens, N.Y. The plane had 260 passengers and crew members and none are believed to have survived. Five people on the ground are missing and feared dead.

Preliminary analysis of the cockpit voice recording of Flight 587 found that the first sign of trouble came less than two minutes after takeoff from New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport, investigators said today.

NTSB investigator George Black said a rattling sound is heard on the tape coming from the aircraft 107 seconds after the jet's engines powered up, presumably for takeoff. Seven seconds later, the plane encountered wake from another jet, and another seven seconds later, a second more audible rattling sound was heard. At the 127 second mark, Black said, there were "several comments" about losing control of the aircraft.

Less than 20 seconds later, the cockpit recording ends. In all, the recording — from takeoff to the end— lasts 2 minutes and 24 seconds.

Investigators said they have identified all the major structures of the aircraft. Black said the NTSB would be running sophisticated analyses of the tape, including comparing background sounds to an extensive library of sounds that might help identify stray, but perhaps telling noises.

Black said witnesses so far have given similar accounts of the crash.

"They saw the aircraft wobble, they saw pieces come from it andthat it went into a steep, spiraling dive into the ground," Blacksaid.

Second Black Box Found

Investigators hope they will find more clues on whether Flight 587's crash was an accident or an act of terrorism in the plane's flight data recorder. The recorder normally contains vital information such as engine parameters, engine power and control surfaces of the airplane before it went down, will give them a better understanding of what happened.