Dear Friends:

U.S.Read has released Part 6 of our preliminary report: "Eyewitness Accounts"

http://www.usread.com/flight587/Prelim_Report/Part6.html

For us who have closely followed all the aspects of the AA 587 Investigation, it began with the eyewitness statements and has come full circle back to them. In this release we include 27 eyewitness accounts -- so you can hear from the very people who were there that day.

Throughout, we have remained objective. We have remained open to the possibility that tail separation was indeed the cause of the crash and that perhaps there was a flaw with the rudder system or the tail.

Throughout this process what we found was that there was not a single piece of evidence which *strongly* supported the conclusion that the tail departure was the cause of the crash. On the other hand, *all* the evidence suggests that:

(a) the tail was just a consequence of a crash sequence that was already underway.

(b) the the tail departed several seconds after the NTSB has concluded it did -- *after* the crew had lost control of the aircraft.

(c) the witness statements, far from being in conflict with the evidence, offer a consistent and disturbing glimpse into the events of that awful day and the failures of the NTSB investigation.

We have been astounded at the complete absence of a discussion, from not just the NTSB, but even the parties to the investigation, of all the evidence we have offered to you: radar data, debris field, tollbooth video, DFDR, CVR, witnesses, etc. It's amazing how rudder/tail centric this investigation has been from the beginning.

Many of you have asked us ... "what's next?" .... "what can we do?"

We must move on and away from AA 57 ­­ although we will *never* forget.

As the families are slowly moving on from the terrible grief of losing their loved ones ­­ we too will move on. U.S.Read will not make AA 587 some life long crusade. We will not be filing FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests till the cows come home. It is my hope that soon after the Final Report (it may take several weeks for the NTSB to make the full docket available) ... we will release our final AA 587 article. We hope we have provided a service for those who care about AA 587.

We will attempt to release one or two more parts of our preliminary report before the NTSB's final report ­­ to cover the CVR and DFDR issues. But given the proximity to the final report by the NTSB ... we may wait till the NTSB closes the AA 587 docket.

Warmest Regards,

Victor Trombettas and Brett Hoffstadt