Monday, Nov. 12, 2001 11:34 p.m. EST

Aviation expert and former National Transportation Safety Board

official Vernon Grose said late Monday that he's increasingly

skeptical that the crash of American Airlines Flight 587 was purely

accidental.

"I am backing away from the ready idea that this is simply an

accident," Grose told Fox News Channel's John Scott.

The veteran air crash prober said that he questions the sequence in

which the plane broke up over Jamaica Bay before slamming into a

residential area in Rockaway, Queens.

"Photographs you've already shown tonight [indicate] the vertical

stabilizer of the aircraft with the American Airlines insignia right on

it [fell into] Jamaica Bay long before the engine falls off in Queens," he

told Scott.

Grose said that if the vertical stabilizer detached from Fight 587

over Jamaica Bay, which the plane traversed before plummeting to

the ground in Rockaway, it suggested that catastrophic engine

failure alone may not have caused the crash.

"No, I don't think that's the situation at all," he told FNC.

"The engine that came free, which apparently was the number 1 left

engine, crashed on land. That was well after the vertical stabilizer

was detached from the aircraft, and that tells me that somehow ...

the airplane was progressively disintegrating, not just losing an

engine and then diving into the ground."

"Earlier today I thought it was simply the loss of an engine that

caused this," Grose said. "But I'm not convinced now. ... I am

becoming more skeptical."