American Airlines Flight 587 was a regularly scheduled international passenger flight from John F. Kennedy International Airport to Las Américas International Airport in Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic. On November 12, 2001, the Airbus A300B4-605R flying the route crashed into the neighborhood of Belle Harbor on the Rockaway Peninsula of Queens, New York City, shortly after takeoff. All 260 people aboard the plane (251 passengers and 9 crew members) were killed, as well as five people on the ground. It is the second-deadliest aviation accident in U.S. history, behind the crash of American Airlines Flight 191 in 1979, and the second-deadliest aviation incident involving an Airbus A300.

The location of the accident, and the fact that it took place two months and one day after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in nearby Manhattan, initially spawned fears of another terrorist attack, but the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) attributed the disaster to the first officer's overuse of rudder controls in response to wake turbulence from a preceding Japan Airlines Boeing 747-400 that took off minutes before it. According to the NTSB, the aggressive use of the rudder controls by the first officer stressed the vertical stabilizer until it separated from the aircraft. The airliner's two engines also separated from the aircraft before impact due to the intense forces.