Searchers Recover Jet’s Voice Recorder

An underwater Navy robot, operating by remote control 700 feet beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean, retrieved a cockpit voice recorder late Wednesday that should contain clues to the crash of an Alaska Airlines jet off the Ventura County coast. Earlier in the day, the Coast Guard called off its search for survivors, saying there was no chance any of the 88 people aboard Flight 261 could have lived.

Later, a federal safety official provided the most graphic description yet of the crash after interviewing pilots of three nearby planes who watched the jet plunge into the sea Monday afternoon.

“All three pilots used terms [such] as . . . ‘tumbling, spinning, nose-down, continuous roll, corkscrewing and inverted,’ ” John Hammerschmidt of the National Transportation Safety Board told reporters Wednesday night.

The voice recorder, one of two so-called black boxes aboard the plane, was found by the submersible Scorpio, deployed by the San Diego-based Navy vessel Kellie Chouest. “As luck would have it, as soon as they got to the bottom, they found the box. It appeared to be perfectly fine,” Navy Capt. Terry Labrecque said.

The box, about the size of a rural mailbox and painted bright orange despite its name, was on the ocean floor a short distance from the main body of wreckage, Labrecque said.

Search teams still have not found the flight data recorder, which will be crucial to the investigation.

In Phoenix, meanwhile, an American Airlines flight made an emergency landing Wednesday morning after reporting a “stabilizer trim jam,”--the same problem that pilots on the doomed Alaska flight reported to air controllers a few minutes before they crashed. The American crew was flying the same model plane, a twin-engine MD-83, that was being used on the Alaska Airlines flight.

A plane’s horizontal stabilizer controls its up and down pitch, and is therefore critical to maintaining a stable course. The trim mechanism on an MD-83 consists of two motors, only one of which is needed at a time, that move the horizontal stabilizer along its axis.

The pilots of American Flight 1538, keenly aware of the fate of the Alaska flight, shut down the errant system and used other controls to make a normal landing at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, according to sources at American who spoke on condition of anonymity. No one aboard the flight, which was en route from Phoenix to Denver, was reported hurt.

The problem was reported about 20 minutes after takeoff, when the plane was at 13,000 feet.

The NTSB immediately sent the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder from the American flight to Washington for study, but said it was premature to compare the two incidents or to consider measures such as grounding other MD-83s.

“There’s really nothing that we’re going to do until we have the facts,” said Phil Frame, an NTSB spokesman in Washington.

A spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration also said no action was being taken immediately. Referring to the Alaska Airlines crash, spokesman Eliot Brenner said: “We are, of course, exploring every issue associated with stabilizers and would not hesitate to act if we saw an area of concern.”

The government has previously expressed concern about stabilizers. The FAA has issued two Airworthiness Directives in the last four years requiring inspection and repairs of the horizontal stabilizer trim systems in MD-80s and their sister DC-9s. The most recent directive calls for inspections to determine whether the stabilizers are corroded.

Generally Good Safety Record

The MD-80 series of jets has a generally good track record. There are slightly more than 700 of the planes registered in the United States, and 1,059 worldwide.

Although early indications point to the horizontal stabilizer as the source of the Alaska Airlines crash, NTSB officials have strenuously insisted that it is too early to make any determination, and have tried to discourage speculation.

“We are far from pointing to a specific cause of this accident,” said Hammerschmidt.

However, investigators have made it clear that they are zeroing in on the stabilizer trim problem. NTSB sources said they are considering the possibility that, in trying to reconfigure the plane for an emergency landing at Los Angeles International Airport, the pilots may have exacerbated the problem, perhaps precipitating the final dive.

The Alaska Airlines plane was en route from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, to San Francisco and Seattle when it dove into the ocean at 4:21 p.m. Monday. Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thomas Collins said he “made a difficult decision” to call off the search for survivors of the crash as of noon Wednesday.

Collins said he based his decision on several factors, beginning with the certainty “that we have searched in the right place.” Debris was confined to a slowly drifting, relatively compact area of slightly more than 3 miles by 5 miles and searchers had pinpointed the precise site of the crash within minutes. Relatively calm seas and good weather also helped, Collins said.

Finally, he said, the combination of water temperature--about 53 degrees--and time “exceeded the estimates of survivability.”

“Therefore,” he said, “we must proceed to the next phase . . . from search and rescue to search and recovery.”

Collins, speaking to reporters at the crash investigation headquarters in Port Hueneme, added that he had informed families and friends of the crash victims of his decision Tuesday night. “There were several expressions of desire to keep the efforts going. . . . I was very candid, very frank to them. I explained the rationale for our decision. It was the correct decision.”

Around noon Wednesday, a 50-foot fishing boat carrying 18 people, including relatives of three victims of the crash, cut a solitary course from Port Hueneme to the crash site. Mourners leaned over the bow, or stood close together and squinted into the reflective glare.

A Coast Guard escort followed several hundred yards behind, and admonished the news media over the radio to stay far away.

Less than three miles north of Anacapa Island, as the wind died and a swell mounted, the boat stopped, and family members moved to the stern for a memorial service. Within a half hour they were headed back to port.

“This is one of the toughest things I’ve ever had to do,” said boat captain Fred Mathis, a 52-year-old Ventura resident. “These people may never have closure. They don’t have bodies to bury, they don’t have anything to hang on to.”

As the search mission shifted its focus, the Navy began moving out its big ships and sending in four smaller vessels equipped with special marine salvage equipment.

The Kellie Chouest, a motor vessel, arrived with its remote-controlled submarine, Scorpio, and side-scanning sonar, which is lowered into the ocean floor and scans sideways for forms that could be debris. Identical equipment was used in investigations into the crashes of TWA Flight 800 off the Long Island coastline in New York and EgyptAir Flight 990 off the Massachusetts coast.

The boat arrived at Port Hueneme Wednesday and deployed the submersible in the early evening. Technicians, using a computer terminal and hand controls, guided Scorpio to the debris field at the end of a 1,500-foot tether, said Capt. Bert Marsh, supervisor of Navy salvage operations from the Naval Sea Systems Command in Washington.

Two similarly equipped vessels, the Sioux and the Independence, were also being sent, as was a fourth, the Cleveland, a landing platform dock equipped with cranes and other recovery gear.

Coast Guard officials closed an area of 18 miles around the crash site to all nonmilitary boat traffic.

Before retrieving the voice recorder Wednesday, searchers sent remote video cameras down on cables to film the remains of the downed plane to get a better sense of where the submersibles should look.

Capt. Bert Marsh, a Navy salvage expert who also worked on the East Coast crashes of EgyptAir 990 and the private plane piloted by John F. Kennedy Jr., said the depth of the water “is out of our range as far as the Navy’s divers are concerned.”

Investigators are hoping the voice recorder picked up the last bits of conversation between the pilots before the plane went down Monday. It could prove to be a critical piece of evidence for investigators trying to understand why the aircraft went down, said Terry Williams, an NTSB spokesman.

The recorder was being shipped to the NTSB central office in Washington, where investigators will listen to the tape. But it still could be some time before the last words of the pilots are actually heard.

“It really depends on the condition of the box,” Williams said.

In one of the eeriest twists to the investigation, the NTSB reported that a civilian on the beach in Ventura took a photograph that, apparently by sheer coincidence, appears to include the Alaska Airlines plane in the seconds before it crashed.

“We do have a print,” said Ted Lopatkiewicz, an NTSB spokesman. “There is something in the far distance. We’ll blow it up and take a look at it. But I should stress, it’s a very faint image at a long distance. If you look at it with the naked eye, you can’t tell what it is.”

NTSB officials also privately expressed skepticism about a newspaper report that the crew that flew the same plane to Puerto Vallarta earlier the day of the crash had reported problems with the horizontal stabilizer. However, Lopatkiewicz said the agency would look into the matter and interview the southbound crew, which had turned over the plane to the crew that died in the crash.

Interviews Planned With Pilots, Mechanics

Alaska Airlines spokesman Jack Evans said the company has no record of problems on the aircraft before Monday afternoon. Evans said the NTSB had “frozen” the two pilots who flew the plane down--meaning they are not to comment to anyone until they are interviewed by federal officials.

The NTSB also said it was looking into a call by the doomed flight crew to maintenance workers in Seattle in the minutes before the crash. A recording of the call kept by the maintenance workers was of such poor quality that it was hard to learn anything from it, officials said. Investigators are hoping they will learn more by interviewing the maintenance officials and by listening to the cockpit voice recorder when and if it is recovered.

NTSB investigators also went to Puerto Vallarta to look into what took place during the plane’s stay there, presumably including whatever maintenance was done.

Los Angeles County officials said they had not yet seen debris from the crash appear on local beaches.

“Thank God we haven’t found anything,” said Wayne Schumaker, chief of facilities and property maintenance for Los Angeles County beaches.

But with a southbound storm heading toward the area Wednesday night, county officials said they were preparing for just that.

“That [storm] will get the water moving,” said Phil Morris, watch sergeant with the Malibu/Lost Hills sheriff’s station in Calabasas. “I expect to get something.”

When they do, he said, they have been instructed to contact NTSB officials, who are collecting all crash debris.

If electronic equipment washes up on beaches, coast patrols have been instructed to leave it untouched or in the water until NTSB officials arrive, Morris said.

“They don’t want us to take electronic things out of the water, but as far as body parts or stuff like that, we can just bag that stuff up and do that ugly job,” he said.

Times staff writers Erin Texeira, Nicholas Riccardi, Richard Winton, Joe Mozingo, Mary Beth Sheridan and Matt Surman, and Times Community News reporters Gina Piccalo and Holly J. Wolcott contributed to this story.

For updates on the crash of Alaska Airlines Flight 261 and more Times photos, go to The Times’ Web site: https://www.latimes.com/flight261

* NEIGHBORS, SCHOOL GRIEVE

The lives of two families lost in the crash were closely bound to a Seattle school. A17

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Underwater Profile of Debris Site

The wreckage of Flight 261 is scattered on the sea bottom a depths of 700 feet. It is possible that some bottom debris will drift into under-

water canyons deeper than 2,000 feet, while surface debris drifts

into the Santa Barbara Channel, but the current direction and

rate is highly variable. Shown here is a profile of the

underwater topography of the area:

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3-D map by GeoInsight International, Inc. www/GeoInsight.com

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Sources: UC Santa Barbara; Center for Coastal Studies, Scripps Institution of Oceanography; Researched by JULIE SHEER and MARK PHILLIPS /Los Angeles Times

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Recovery Efforts

The U.S. Navy has added ships in support of search and recovery operations for Alaska Airlines Flight 261. Among them is the Sioux, which has heavy lift equipment

as well as side-scan sonar. Here is how

its sonar operates:

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Researched by RICHARD WINTON and LYNN MEERSMAN / Los Angeles Times

Source: U.S. Navy

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