Talk:American Airlines Flight 587

Why on earth are the dogs mentioned in the beginning?

"All 260 people aboard the plane (251 passengers and nine crew members) died, plus one dog carried in the cargo hold;[2] five bystanders and one other dog on the ground were killed as well" What's up with that? Moshe Schorr (talk) 01:02, 11 January 2018 (UTC)

That documented information is part of the record of the accident, and Wikipedia is WP:NOTCENSORED. Spintendo ᔦᔭ 09:01, 11 January 2018 (UTC)

I'm not seeing how WP:NOTCENSORED applies here?

My complaint about the dog mention is that it doesn't belong in the lead! It's not an essential or even moderately important part of this disaster. It's tangential trivia, and as such it belongs in a more narrowly focused section in the main body. I think it will be a good addition to the article though, once we get it refined a bit. I'll go ahead and make the initial changes that I feel are appropriate, and maybe someone else can improve it more from there.

Does everybody agree this makes sense? Ninjalectual (talk) 03:51, 8 June 2018 (UTC)

Well that was easy, the doggos are already covered adequately in the Victims section. That makes sense. I just removed the mentions from the lead. Ninjalectual (talk) 04:01, 8 June 2018 (UTC)

@Ninjalectual: But you did not give an adequate reason why it should be removed from the lead, specifically, why it counts as trivia. The lead already features other bits of information which may be considered trivia, including the crash's rank place of deadliest crashes on US soil, and mentions the JAL flight which took off before it, which played a trivial factor in the crash. The lead mentions an overall summary of everything that was killed in the crash, and these animals were killed in the crash. If you have a bias towards including animals in a crash introduction (and I mean checked animals, not insects or other such straw man arguments) then you should explain the nature of your bias here on the talk page.  spintendo  02:50, 9 June 2018 (UTC)

I would argue it should be removed from the victim section as well. It's not encyclopedic. It's irrelevant. It gives the dogs a focus we normally save for humans. /Julle (talk) 00:35, 8 April 2019 (UTC)

The fact that two canines were killed was relevant enough to be included in the Victim Fragmentation Patterns and Seat Location Supplements Crash Data report. Other items of non-human information are documented in the Wikipedia article as well, such as the fate of the two engines, which are described in detail. And yet, no one would suggest that describing what happened to non-living objects on the plane in any way diminishes discussion about what happened to the living things on board. Placing this information in the Victims section merely recognizes that these were living items onboard the plane (or on the ground) which were killed, as opposed to the placement of the engines in the crash section, which mentions the non-living items from the plane which were destroyed. It goes without saying that life alone is not a prerequisite for being mentioned, as information on the number of microorganisms killed on the plane is not mentioned (or even tallied for that matter). But a dog is certainly not a microorganism. If a crate of exotic birds were placed in the cargo hold, or if the plane had crashed into a pet store killing all the animals inside, these would be mentioned as well, as they would be relevent facts which occurred due to the plane crashing, like any other bit of information which came about as a direct result of this accident.  Spintendo  01:05, 8 April 2019 (UTC)

I completely agree with Julle on this, and if you think the wake turbulence created by the JAL aircraft is trivial your creditability and understanding aircraft accidents is questionable. - Samf4u (talk) 13:34, 8 April 2019 (UTC)

@Samf4u: Which specific wake turbulence event are you referring to? There were multiple ones from JAL and the FO had different responses to each one.  Spintendo  23:32, 11 April 2019 (UTC)

Text vs. video (20 seconds?)

"...the first officer alternated between moving the rudder from the left to the right and back again in quick succession for at least 20 seconds, until 9:15:56, when the stress caused the lugs that attached the vertical stabilizer and rudder to fail" - but the animation shows no rudder movement until after 9:15:52 lasting for only about 3 seconds before breaking. Also a quick look into the source: "At 0915:51.8, 0915:52.3, and 0915:52.9, the CVR recorded the sound of a thump, a click, and two thumps, respectively. At 0915:54.2, the first officer stated, in a strained ... The CVR recorded the sound of a snap at 0915:56.6" matching the animation and contradicting the article. --StYxXx (talk) 02:13, 9 August 2019 (UTC)

I've removed the mention of 20 seconds and the other times mentioned as occurring during the rudder inputs. The article mentioned two times - the beginning of the wake turbulence and the time of the separation. But the cyclic rudder inputs - to the left, to the right - did not occur continuously during that time. Placing the description of the FO's rudder inputs in the middle of the prose between these two times may erroneously lead readers to believe that the rudder inputs were occurring continuously in response to one wake turbulence event when they were occurring intermittently in response to multiple real and poorly perceived wake turbulence events. This may have been where the 20 seconds was accidentaly added to the article. The duration of the final cyclic rudder inputs was actually closer to 7 seconds according to the report. Regards,  Spintendo  04:48, 9 August 2019 (UTC)

References

Future FA Ideas

@Spintendo: Hello, I was wondering if I can have permission to nominate this for FA in the future. With more improvement, I believe we can turn this article into a featured one. We conquered GA, lets aim big. AmericanAir88^(talk) 23:19, 16 September 2019 (UTC)

Of course I would support going in that direction — but before that step, I think it would be helpful to get feedback from a really top-drawer editor, say Cassianto for example, to see what the article's chances are. I know you've worked with them before, and I definately think that getting either their input or someone they recommend would be extremely valuable to gauge where the article is and what's needed. Cassianto's profile says "semi-retired" so I'm not so sure if they would be able to offer any spare time. It's a short article really, and what we need is only like 5 minutes of feedback — any input, criticism, suggestions — however generous they're able to be with their time. We need to soak up whatever tidbits we can get, because its that information that will help the article get into a place where it has a fighting chance to succeed at FA. All of this info gathering should be done before the FA process begins.

All of that being said, I think that there is one other issue which may be important here. Articles stand a better chance of getting FA status when there is a rich selection of academic materials written about their subjects. While this crash does have a unique technical aspect of it which has been written by experts in human factors and material sciences, there is still a lack of really good academic material written about it. The material we have is primarily the NTSB report and related news aspects of the crash. FA articles have a wide variety of published materials available to be used, and I think that this may be lacking in the case of this American Airlines flight. The feedback we get from editors like Cassianto would likely bring up this lack of sourcing, and if they feel the article is not ready, then the article might just have to wait until better sources are found (which means a trip to the library, which I'm willing to make). Regards,  Spintendo  16:37, 17 September 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for the ping and for the kind comments, although there are far better than me out there, I'm sure. My advice would be to go through this article and compare it in context and structure to a similar article already at FA, like American Airlines Flight 11, for instance. As Spintendo correctly points out, you have found me at a particularly busy time in real life, so I may not be very quick in getting to you. I'm struggling to do anything around here at the moment, including reviews for long standing friends, but if I do find the time then I will give it a copy edit, but I can't make any promises. Cassianto^Talk 17:05, 17 September 2019 (UTC)

@Cassianto: and @Spintendo: Thank you for the imput. AA11 definitely received a ton of more coverage, so I will make sure to find other references. This crash however marks a significant point in aviation as it proves that reactionary thoughts can be wrong (Cause was not terrorism) and this was the last major AA crash. I'd give my full momentum to improve and eventually nominate the article. The only other article of mine that I am trying to get to FA is Deep Space Homer (Currently in peer review and I am prepping for a 4th run after). I definitely can see this article being potential for FA. AmericanAir88^(talk) 20:47, 17 September 2019 (UTC)

Notes

Initial terrorism concerns and cultural background

Even though this is a good article, I am concerned about the relevance and importance of these sections, as they both seem to stray away from the article. Are there parts of these sections that can be kept? Tigerdude9 (talk) 14:30, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

Ground injury?

I do not see a good reference for the one injury on the ground. Even the NTSB's final report states that 5 people on the ground and everyone on the plane received fatal injuries. However, the report never states that someone on the ground was injured. Should I remove the ground injury? Why can't I edit Userpedia? (talk) 03:55, 22 May 2020 (UTC)