"WAKE TURBULENCE" OF A DIFFERENT KIND.(Brief Article)

As if there weren't already enough heartache and misery, just a month after the September 11 terrorist attack, American Airlines Flight 587 crashed into a heavily populated section of the New York City borough of Queens. Investigations are unbelievably meticulous, so even now conclusions are few and far between.

But there is much evidence to suggest that "wake turbulence" played a major role in the November 13 crash that claimed at least 265 lives. Wake turbulence is the technical term for the "invisible, tornado-like spiral of moving air left behind by a plane's wingtips."

Almost immediately we learned that a Japan Airlines Boeing 747 had taken off just two minutes and 20 seconds before Flight 587. According to data from the plane's flight data recorder, 587 encountered turbulence twice soon after takeoff. Within a matter of seconds after hitting the second wake, the American Airlines plane began banking hard with its left wing down, and then dove into the ground.

Consider this: no sooner had I read an account of the tragedy than a quick perusal of the web brought me to a ghastly story that appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Montgomery County prosecutors had just changed a third-degree murder charge against Henry C. Hohberger III to a first-degree murder charge in the death of his seven-day-old baby daughter, Nicole.

The Inquirer said, according to police reports, that prosecutors, "raised charges against [Hohberger] accused of killing his infant daughter to first-degree murder after the mother told police he had repeatedly tried to get her to have an abortion. He reportedly told a maternity nurse that `I already have a daughter... . It's supposed to be a damn boy.' "

The child died from massive injuries, according to the report by Bennett Preston of the Philadelphia Medical Examiner's Office, who ruled the child's death a homicide. According to the Inquirer,

"Among her injuries were four broken ribs that were healing. [Montgomery County District Attorney Bruce] Castor said that he could not say for sure when those injuries were inflicted. Nicole also had 11 newly broken ribs, two fractures to her skull, and multiple hemorrhages to her head and eyes, Preston's report stated."