July 22, 1993

The massing of emergency vehicles was partly to blame for hours of delays in getting survivors of a 1990 airplane crash to hospitals, which may have raised the death toll by 20 percent, according to a report by Brookhaven National Laboratory. Of the 158 people on the Avianca Airlines plane coming to Kennedy International Airport from Bogota, Colombia, in January 1990, 73 people, including 8 of the 9 crew members, died. The report said the deaths of 17 of those were caused in part by loss of blood.

With videotapes, flip-charts, enlargements of once-secret memos and thousands of documents, armies of lawyers in Federal District Court here are re-enacting the airline fare war of 1992. In an elegantly restored courtroom with carved wooden panels and silk drapes, Continental Airlines and Northwest Airlines are trying to draw blood, demonstrating that American Airlines engaged in "predatory pricing." That means setting fares so low that American would lose money, but so would its weaker rivals, who might be forced out of business.

For more than a month now, the Mississippi, the Missouri, the Des Moines, rivers all over the Midwest, have been bursting levees, drowning crops and entire towns, shutting down roads and bridges, and forcing thousands of people from their homes. The losses are staggering: 16 million acres of farmland under water, property damage estimated at $10 billion.

American Airlines yesterday reported its first quarterly profit in almost two years, and a top executive took the occasion to invite the airline's unions to discuss an equity stake. It coupled the invitation with a threat to eliminate service in less-profitable markets. The AMR Corporation, the airline's parent, said that in the second quarter it earned $47 million, or 39 cents a share, in contrast with a loss of $183 million a year ago. Revenues rose 17.4 percent in the quarter to $4.21 billion.

The state report this week on the Crown Heights violence two years ago told a story about the crisis different from the one told by New York City news organizations at the time. With its details of official inattention and miscalculation that virtually escaped press notice as the events were unfolding, the report provided a reminder of both the functions and the limitations of news reports, which are sometimes called a first draft of history.