New York and civil aviation were both dealt a crushing blow by the crash of American Airlines Flight 587 in Queens yesterday morning.
Two months and one day after American Airlines Flight 11 hit the first of the Twin Towers at the World Trade Centre in Manhattan, another part of New York has been devastated by a passenger plane gorged with aviation fuel plunging from the sky.
The city has been on edge since September 11th, waiting for something else to happen, but the awful tensions of the immediate aftermath of that terrible day had been gradually easing. Bookings for Broadway shows and city restaurants were picking up. Christmas lights had been turned on in Fifth Avenue. The anthrax scare had petered out, with one fatality, a woman of Viernamese origin, who inhaled deadly spores from a contaminated envelope.
The long, unbearable series of memorial services for the victims of the World Trade Centre had just about come to an end.
Yesterday the horror returned. Once again there was a pall of black smoke over the city and fire trucks were screaming from all directions to what - if it was a terrorist attack - is now America's new front line. The airports were immediately closed, the Empire State Building evacuated, bridges and tunnels blocked, traffic gridlocked.
The calamtiy was made more poignant by the fact that the area where the Airbus crashed was home to many of the Irish-American firemen who perished on September 11th. Part of the plane hit a church on 130th Street where 10 memorial services had been held.
With National Guard troops on the streets and military aircraft overhead, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani warned that "the city has got to be on an even higher state of security", which to many New Yorkers must have sounded like a declaration that their city was been put on a war footing. By closing the airports even temporarily, the Federal Aviation Administration was saying once again that it was unsafe, even dangerous, to fly.
The effects on the American and international airline companies can only be described as catastrophic. Fear of flying has become terror of flying.
Only a $15 billion Federal bailout saved the major carriers from going into bankruptcy in the weeks after September 11th. The Thanksgiving holiday rush was about to get under way in America and airlines were hoping that they could start to recover from the 30 per cent drop in passenger levels following the attack on the World Trade Centre.
Federal authorities had assigned extra inspectors to watch for security problems, as criticism mounted over continuing lapses in security, the most blatant being at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago where two weeks ago a man - not suspected of terrorism - got through a baggage check with five knives and other weapons in his shoulder bag.
The FAA is charged with monitoring airport security as a whole but the screeners are low-wage contract workers supplied by private companies. With President Bush's collusion, and under heavy pressure from security companies, which are big political donors, the US House of Representatives refused last week to pass legislation making them Federal employees and therefore more accountable.
On Friday, Mr Bush asked governors to call up 2,000 more National Guard troops for airport security duty during the November 22nd-25th holiday. If it was a measure to restore confidence, it will do little. American travellers can be forgiven deep scepticism about the ability of the airlines, the FAA or the armed forces to ensure their safety.
Confidence in the government's handling of "homeland security" has been sapped by the failure to find the anthrax terrorist and it will be further eroded by the absense of any official conclusion about what happened yesterday.
The crash did more than leave New York in deep shock. It shook the stock markets in New York and in other financial centres, showing how fragile the world market and its global infrastructures are to a perceived terrorist attack. Shares on all major indices started to fall immediately word of the calamity reached Wall Street.
Only last week the Dow Jones had recovered to its pre-September 11th level. AMR Corporation, the parent company of American Airlines, dropped 14 per cent, having already lost 47 per cent since the attacks. Stocks in other airlines and travel-related businesses also tumbled at the prospect that another wave of cancellations will keep people grounded this Thanksgiving, and for long after.
In the hours following the crash, no one could say for sure if it had been a terrorist attack or an accident, whether the plane, with its 246 passengers and nine crew members, was being flown by a terrorist towards the United Nations Building, which was on its flight path, or if it was carrying a bomb, or if it suffered a dreadful mechanical failure. But New Yorkers were left wondering how much more their city can take, and what more is to come.
Conor O'Clery is International Business Editor and is based on Wall Street