Jetliner Plunges Into Pacific

An Alaska Airlines jetliner en route from Puerto Vallarta to San Francisco and Seattle with 88 people on board crashed into the sea off Port Hueneme on Monday afternoon after reporting mechanical problems. There were no signs of survivors.

Airline officials said that moments before the twin-engine MD-83 jetliner disappeared from radar screens, the pilots radioed that they were having trouble with the plane’s horizontal stabilizer, the wing-like portion of the tail that controls the up-and-down pitch of the nose.

The Federal Aviation Administration said the jetliner requested, and was granted, clearance to go to Los Angeles International Airport for an emergency landing.

Seconds later, at about 4:40 p.m. witnesses saw the jetliner plunging vertically toward the sea. Officials said the jet, carrying 83 passengers, three flight attendants and two pilots, slammed into the water about five miles north of Anacapa Island.

“We heard a big boom and we saw a big splash, I mean like 200 feet in the air,” said Tony Alfieri, owner of a squid-fishing boat. As his crew sped to the oil slick marking the impact point, the sea was awash with horrifying bits of debris: suitcases, magazines, small pieces of plane and human remains.

“We thought, ‘Oh my God, this is not a good deal’ ” Alfieri said.

Personnel aboard Coast Guard vessels sent to the crash site said they had recovered several bodies.

As sunset approached, a rescue pilot circled low above the crash sight, staring at the vague outline of what looked like the airliner itself, glistening beneath the surface.

“We’re going to search the ocean until there’s a zero chance of survivors,” said Coast Guard Capt. George Wright.

Ventura County fire and sheriff’s officials set up an emergency operations center at the Coast Guard headquarters at Channel Islands Harbor. The emergency response included medical personnel and the imposition of the highest-stage alert for the county Office of Emergency Services, said Supervisor John K. Flynn.

A makeshift morgue was planned for the Port Hueneme Construction Battalion Center, Flynn said.

At nightfall, recovery crews equipped with spotlights, night-vision goggles and infrared sensing devices joined the search. The surging sea and high winds spread aircraft debris over a wide area. Dolphins swam through the chaos, as boat radios broadcast a cacophony of unintelligible chatter.

In the middle of the debris field, illuminated by spotlights, shattered fragments suddenly became grimly clear: candy wrappers, purses, seat cushions, then part of a human body.

“Oh man,” said Charles Richards, a deckhand on one of the many civilian boats that braved heavy seas to assist the Coast Guard. “I fish. I don’t do this.”

Rex Avila, 45, a crewman aboard another boat who dived overboard in a wet suit to recover debris, estimated that he had pulled about 200 pounds of material from the water: leather seat cushions from first class, chunks of foam rubber and pieces of plastic.

At first, the recovery efforts were chaotic, but Avila said the Coast Guard organized things quickly.

“They liked all the help they could get,” he said.

Rescue Effort Into the Night

Late into the night, there was little but hope on the cold water. Lights washed over the black seas as rescue ships and fishing boats searched futilely for anyone who might, somehow, still be alive.

In Seattle on Monday night, families of the passengers aboard Flight 261 began filing into SeaTac Airport shortly before 7 p.m.

Bonnie Fuller, of Graham, Wash., arrived expecting to pick up her 31-year-old son who left for Puerto Vallarta three weeks ago with his new fiancee to celebrate their engagement.

“I’m just hoping that maybe he missed the flight or something. He’s perpetually late,” she said, before becoming overcome with grief.

One crying woman leaned heavily on a companion’s shoulder and screamed at photographers: “If you stick that thing in my face one more time, I’ll sue you!” Douglas Kelley, a manager for Alaska Airlines, was appointed to usher grief-stricken families upstairs to a private room where counselors awaited.

Kelley began weeping himself after leading one couple upstairs.

“Their parents were on the flight,” he said. “They didn’t need to be told anything. I just tried to console them.”

In San Francisco, clergy, grief counselors and Salvation Army personnel met with about a dozen people at the airport as a police officer stood guard.

Airport spokesman Ron Wilson said airport personnel would do whatever was needed.

“We’ll put them up for the night. We’ll feed them. We’ll console them. We’ll bring them whatever they desire,” he said.

Lorenar Estrada said she was first told by airline officials that her brothers were on the plane. She said that only after asking them to recheck did she find out that they had taken two other flights.

Airline Employees on Board

Officials said the twin-engine jet took off from the Mexican seaside resort at 3:30 p.m. CST and flew northwest across Baja California and along the West Coast of Southern California. Thirty-two of the passengers had been scheduled to deplane in San Francisco; the rest were to continue on to Seattle.

The two pilots were based in Los Angeles; the flight attendants were from Seattle.

Others included three Alaska Airlines employees, four Horizon Air employees and 23 family members and friends.

The pilot, Ted Thompson, 53, and co-pilot, William Tansky, 47, were experienced flyers. The flight attendants were Kristin Mills, 26, Allison Shanks, 33, and Craig Pulanco, 30.

John Kelly, chief executive officer of the airline, said Alaska Airlines personnel would do everything necessary to aid the families of the passengers.

“These are our families, these are our co-workers, these are our friends, these are our loved ones,” Kelly said. “We hope, hope, hope and pray that we’ll be able to get survivors.”

“Like other passengers, we sit anxiously on the sidelines,” Kelly said. “It’s numbing.”

Kelly said that as a party to the National Transportation Safety Board investigation, he could not release further details about Flight 261 or the circumstances leading to the crash.

“What we have to focus on now is the here and now. The here and now consists of the hopeful rescue efforts that are under way and, obviously, working with the friends and families.”

The 140-seat plane--tail number N963AS--was built in 1992 and had logged 26,584 hours of flight, the airline said. The jetliner had made 14,315 takeoffs.

It had undergone some sort of a service check Sunday, but officials said they did not know the reason for that check. The aircraft had undergone major, regularly scheduled maintenance about three weeks ago.

Alaska Airlines officials said Monday night that they were sure that mechanical failure had caused the crash aboard Flight 261, but the National Transportation Safety Board, which dispatched an investigative team from Washington, cautioned that it was far too early to draw any definitive conclusions.

Possibility of Mechanical Problem

The precise nature of the problem experienced on board Flight 261 was not known, but Barry Schiff, a retired Trans World Airlines pilot and aviation safety consultant, said the jetliner may have been thrown into a dive by a relatively rare mechanical problem known as “runaway stabilizer trim.”

The trim, he said, is used to adjust the pitch of the stabilizer to keep the plane flying level. On long flights, such as one from the resort on Mexico’s West Coast to San Francisco, this trim is often adjusted automatically, by the plane’s autopilot.

In rare instances, he said, these trim adjustments run amok, throwing the plane into a full nose-up or nose-down position. In either case, Schiff said, the plane could end up plummeting nose first, because the full up position could cause a stall that would make the plane dive.

“If that happens, you might not be able to overcome it with the controls,” Schiff said. “You should be able to turn the trim off, but maybe they couldn’t.”

Alaska Airlines pilots are required to demonstrate in a simulator that they can safely fly and land MD-83 aircraft with horizontal stabilizer malfunctions.

A federal grand jury in Northern California has been investigating the airline’s maintenance practices since 1998, according to previous reports in Seattle newspapers.

Along Pacific Coast Highway in Ventura County on Monday night, people gathered at vista points, turnouts and beaches to pray or simply stare out to sea.

At a vista point just south of the Navy base at Point Mugu, two women knelt and prayed over eight candles lined along a fence while, in the distance, flashing lights pinpointed the site of search operations.

Rosie Hernandez, 26, and Ana Barba, 28, both of Oxnard, said they bought the candles for the people aboard the flight.

“I have family in Puerto Vallarta,” said Hernandez. “For this to happen right in our own backyard, it really hits you. Just imagine what they went through when they knew the plane was going down.”

Nearby, Cruzi Pena, 47, and her husband, Paul, 36, stood along a fence. She leaned against it in prayer; he sheltered her.

“I think God is everywhere,” she said, “but I really felt I wanted to be close to the area where it happened. I just asked God to give peace in a situation that seems so hopeless. I’m praying for God’s guardian angels to keep them warm.”

At LAX late Monday, the mood was dark at the Alaska Airlines waiting area in Terminal 3 as word spread that there had been a crash.

Alaska Airlines flight attendants, pulling their wheeled flight bags through the concourse, were red-eyed as they walked into the flight operations room near the passenger loading area about an hour after the accident.

Portland resident Billie Loomas was waiting at LAX to board a flight home after spending two weeks in Mazatlan on a vacation. She said word of the crash was abruptly announced by a security guard at the baggage counter when she got off her plane from Mexico about 4:30 p.m. Loomas said a fellow passenger on her flight couldn’t find her luggage, and asked the guard if it might be on the Puerto Vallarta plane by mistake.

“He said, ‘Well, you may not be getting it if it is. That plane has crashed.’ She was scared to death. She said, ‘I’m glad I wasn’t on the plane with my luggage.’ I told her to forget about her luggage,” Loomas said.

Unusual Flurry of Activity

Passengers from an Alaska Airlines flight from Puerto Vallarta to Los Angeles, which left about an hour before the doomed flight, said they were struck by an unusual flurry of activity by ramp workers and Alaska Airlines workers as they arrived late.

One passenger, 60-year-old Johnnie Baker, a semiretired farmer and private pilot from Salem, Ore., who was returning from a two-week vacation in Puerto Vallarta, said he was unfazed by news of the crash and wasn’t worried about continuing home aboard Alaska Airlines.

“I soloed on my 16th birthday,” Baker said. “If I’d quit flying when one of my friends went in, I’d have quit at 18.”

Another passenger, Fran Lattin, ran to a phone to call her children in Oregon to assure them that she wasn’t on the missing flight. “We left our itinerary at the house and they have a key, but I don’t want them to worry,” she said.

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For updates on the crash of Alaska Airlines Flight 261, go to The Times’ Web site: https://www.latimes.com

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Fatal Flight

The Alaska Airlines flight that crashed Monday afternoon in the Pacific Ocean between Port Hueneme and Anacapa Island was en route from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, to San Francisco. The plane was reportedly diverted to LAX after the pilot radioed problems with the plane’s stabilizer trim shortly before the crash.

Sources: Staff reports; Boeing; Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft; “All You Ever Wanted to Know About Flying”; compiled by JULIE SHEER/Los Angeles Times

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* Contributing to the coverage of the Alaska Airlines crash were Times staff writers Fred Alvarez, Andrew Blankstein, Bettina Boxall, Miles Corwin, Tina Dirmann, Jeffrey Gettleman, Robert Lee Hotz, Mitchell Landsberg, Usha Lee McFarling, Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, Ann O’Neill, Bob Pool, Louis Sahagun, Beth Shuster, Matt Surman, and Erin Texeira in Los Angeles and Ventura counties; Joseph Menn, Charles Piller and Tim Reiterman in San Francisco; Stanley Holmes and Kim Murphy in Seattle; and Mary Beth Sheridan in Mexico City. Also contributing were Times Community News reporters Jessica Garrison, Tony Lystra, Sylvia Pagan Westphal and Holly Wolcott. Times staff photographers covering the crash were Bryan Chan, Carlos Chavez, Ricardo De Aratanha, Bob Durell, Gary Friedman, Alan Hagman, Mel Melcon, Steve Osman, Anacleto Rapping and Spencer Weiner.

Fatal Flight

The Alaska Airlines flight that crashed Monday afternoon in the Pacific Ocean between Port Hueneme and Anacapa Island was en route from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, to San Francisco. The plane was reportedly diverted to LAX after the pilot radioed problems with the plane’s stabilizer trim shortly before the crash.

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Sources: Staff reports; Boeing; Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft; “All You Ever Wanted to Know About Flying”; compiled by JULIE SHEER/Los Angeles Times