For Rescuers Hope Sank With the Sunlight

The search started at dusk, the sky reddening in the west, the water turning from gray to charcoal when the Coast Guard asked ships that were able to assemble north of Anacapa Island.

They asked that only those ships with proper equipment come. The equipment, they said, was hooks and nets.

Aboard the Wesley Q, a 36-foot sportfishing boat, Eric Hermann and Matt Keegan steamed past dolphins frolicking in the waves. The pair had just weeks ago flown Alaska Airlines to Mexico and back with their wives--a winter vacation.

All anyone knew is what they had learned from people flying over the scene. Cmdr. Kevin Prindle, a pilot with the Weapons Test Squadron at the Point Mugu naval base, earlier was preparing for a routine training flight when he got word that a civilian aircraft had just disappeared from radar.

Air traffic controllers at the Mugu base had been aware that the Alaska Airlines flight was in trouble and immediately cleared Prindle and his crew of five to head straight to the crash site. As he approached the area, he saw at least eight helicopters from the news media buzzing overhead.

He also saw a still-compact field of debris made up of pieces of the plane’s fuselage and small bits of other materials, Prindle said. He and the Coast Guard commander in another aircraft at the site spent the first few minutes trying to herd the news helicopters to a higher altitude.

Then flying low over the ocean, Prindle and his crew scoured the water for signs of life.

“We were primarily looking for people and movement,” the pilot said. “We were always holding out hope we would see that. But as the light faded, it was quite evident that it would be tough.”

After the sun sank below the horizon, Prindle headed back to base.

Alaska Airline Flight 261 went straight in at speed, nose first, witnesses said. The impact spread debris across hundreds of yards of cool black water.

About two miles north of Anacapa Island, the sea’s blank four- and five-foot swells began to give way to pink splotches on the water. Hermann and Keegan, like most of the people in the other boats, were used to the sea and its roughness. They were taken aback.

Helicopters roared overhead. The smell of aviation fuel was pervasive, sickening. Lights from the ships, the aircraft, swept across the swells. The dark water glistened.

The radio traffic was an unending racket. No one could hear, think, see or smell as they moved into a debris field that stretched over hundreds of yards of open ocean.

At first, they saw mainly airplane parts, bits of the smashed fuselage. Then the body parts, thickened in the water, nearly indistinguishable from the bits of plane.

The fisherman took out what they could with hooks and nets, trying to separate and match as they went.

Loved Ones Gather to Hear the News

On shore, people gathered in an odd collection of places.

In San Francisco, friends fought to get into rooms where victims of relatives waited at San Francisco International. In Seattle, Bonnie Fuller, of Graham, Wash., arrived at SeaTac Airport expecting to pick up her 31-year-old son who left Seattle for Puerto Vallarta three weeks ago with his 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.

A handful of relatives who heard about the crash on the news arrived at Los Angeles International Airport and were swiftly taken to a private room off Gate 30 in Terminal 3 to meet with American Red Cross workers, an agency spokeswoman said. “We’re providing emotional support . . . and a safe and private area for grieving,” said Los Angeles Red Cross spokeswoman B.V. Castillo. A team of 27 Red Cross counselors and relief workers were being dispatched to Ventura by the agency’s national headquarters.

Then, a large group of parents stood waiting in the terminal for arrival of a second Alaska Airlines flight from Puerto Vallarta that was to have stopped in Los Angeles. A local gymnastics team, The Gymnastics Express, was to have boarded that flight in Los Angeles after a gymnastics meet in Van Nuys.

Strangers United in Their Grief

Near the end of the Port Hueneme Pier, someone threw fresh flowers into the water--about a dozen individual flowers were bobbing near the pier.

As many as 100 people stood along the beach. Some with flashlights checked the sand for debris. Some people with baby strollers. Others walking with hand-held police scanners listening for the latest information.

The SeaTac Airport established a “relative care collection center” in the airport auditorium for about a dozen family members and Alaska Airlines employees who had friends on the flight.

“It’s somber. The room is somber,” said Airport Chaplain John Oas. “There’s a tremendous amount of respect for each other. The voices are in a hushed kind of tone. People are holding one another. The right sort of stuff is happening, as horrible as these kind of things can be.”

Oas said airport employees have been trained to counsel family members through such tragedies. “You can certainly expect this is a tremendous shock for family members planning to come to the airport, planning to greet their families, welcome them home, and now all of this is obviously futile,” he said. “There’s such a sense of disbelief, of shock. . . . We break the news ever so gently to them, but something very tragic definitely has happened.”

Jeff Cacy, assistant vice president of sales and reservations for Alaska Airlines, said the airline would consider flying family members to Los Angeles to be close to the investigation. “We are very committed as a company and as employees to provide whatever assistance is necessary, to take people where they want to be.”

Two Alaska Airlines flights from Puerto Vallarta arrived during the course of the evening. Airline employees clutched hands tensely to guard the deplaning passengers from a clutch of news cameras. One woman who said she had a friend on the doomed flight, was weeping as family members ushered her away. An Alaska Airlines employee on the same flight was also led away in tears. But most passengers who boarded at Puerto Vallarta, said they did not know anyone aboard Flight 261 and had only learned of the tragedy from airline employees.