Just one minute and 47 seconds into the flight of American Airlines Flight 587, pilots heard what investigators have described as an "airframe rattling noise".
Within seconds, the crew had lost control of the plane as it plunged into a Queens New York neighbourhood.
The race is on now to determine the cause of the crash, and already early indications that engine failure was to blame seem to be fading.
A spokesman for General Electric, the manufacturer of the two engines, said they were beginning to feel relieved last night after officials from the National Transportation safety Board, or NTSB, said there was no sign of uncontained engine failure, damage that would have occurred if an engine had blown apart and sent pieces slicing through the airplane.
As in many crashes, early speculation as to the cause often turns out wrong. In this case, the FBI is also quietly conducting what some are calling a "shadow investigation" into the cause.
Background checks are being run on all passengers as well as all maintenance personnel and others who might have had access to the plane. A criminal act or terrorism has not been ruled out.
Some 100 investigators are poring over pieces of the charred wreckage at the crash site in the Rockaways, in an airplane hangar in Brooklyn, and in laboratories in Washington. Ms Marion C. Blakey, chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board, expressed confidence about finding the cause.
A break in the case is that both flight data recorders, which contain some 199 separate pieces of information about the flight, and the voice recorder have all been found.
Although it can take investigators more than a year to produce a final report about a cause, they are often very clear in the first few days about what happened, based on information from those recorders.
Mr George W. Black Jr, the NTSB board member on the scene, said last night that he was struck by the "remarkably similar" eyewitness accounts given by those who saw the crash.
The witnesses, including two airline crews in the area, each described seeing the plane wobble before pieces fell from it. Then they saw the plane take a steep dive to the ground. In addition, Mr Black said a construction worker had videotaped part of the jet's take-off. The wreckage was in a straight line, and apparently no birds had struck the engines, he said. Mr Black said that the captain was hired by American Airlines in 1985, and had more than 8,000 total flying hours, including more than 3,000 flying hours on the Airbus A-300, the type of plane that crashed.
The widow of a firefighter who died in the World Trade Centre attack lost her father in the American Airlines crash, it emerged yesterday.
Just two days after Ms Naomi Gullickson attended a memorial service for her husband Joseph she was forced to start planning for the funeral of her father, Mr Jose Perez.
American Airlines yesterday released the names of all 260 passengers and crew killed on Flight 587, including two people who had survived the World Trade Centre attacks two months ago. Merrill Lynch broker Felix Sanchez (29) and restaurant worker Hilda Yolanda Mayor (26) were on the aircraft on Monday. Both had been in the twin towers on September 11th.