and I doubt Flight 587 is any different. Every flight safety seminar I've ever attended has presentations about how these chain of events can be broken to prevent the accident from occurring. The hardest part is to realize that you're making a series of mistakes and to put the ego on hold to prevent making more.

As an example of what the chain of events might've been on Flight 587, consider this hypothesis:

1. The flight crew detects a problem with the yaw dampener on the ground. Unable to clear the problem, they call a mechanic who resets the dampener's computer. It appears to clear the problem but doesn't.

2. The plane takes off with less than the required two minute separation from a very heavily loaded 747. Its course takes it into the wake turbulence from the 747.

3. The dampener malfunctions in response to the yaw excursions caused by the turbulence. Perhaps it over corrects or perhaps it causes the crew's rudder inputs to be magnified, causing them to overcontrol. This could possibly lead to over stressing the rudder attach points or the vertical stabilizer.

4. Manufacturing defects in one of the vertical stabilizer attach points were detected when the plane was built in 1988 and repaired. Were the repairs adequate? Did they cause overstresses at other attach points? Did the repair degrade over time? Did the composite material delaminate over time? Who knows? All I'm suggesting is that a particular chain of events might've caused an overstress condition that led to the subsequent breakup. Without the vertical stabilizer and rudder, the plane was completely uncontrollable, leading to overstresses that caused the engines to break off before impact.

I only know of the impact points for the rudder, vertical stabilizer, engines, and main wreckage. The rudder and vertical stabilizer landed in the water. The engines landed separately from the main wreckage. I don't know of another impact site on land.

Here's a link to the NTSC webpage for the accident investigation. It has some interesting photos of the recovered vertical stabilizer, rudder, and engines as well as the official NTSB press releases. Unless the composite experts can find something definitive, it could take a long time to solve this crash.