Crisis Procedures May Have Led to Jetliner’s Crash

Investigators are considering whether the pilots of Alaska Airlines Flight 261 unwittingly triggered their violent plunge into the Pacific Ocean by following prescribed procedures for an emergency landing, top federal air safety officials said Thursday.

National Transportation Safety Board officials raised the question after listening to a recording of the pilots’ final 30 minutes that was contained in a cockpit voice recorder retrieved late Wednesday. The other “black box,” the flight data recorder, was recovered early Thursday and immediately shipped to Washington.

One NTSB official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the investigation into the crash in which 88 people died is increasingly focusing on the pilots’ actions during their preparation for an emergency landing at Los Angeles International Airport.

In hindsight, investigators say, it appears possible that a by-the-book response to the mechanical problem reported by the pilots--a “horizontal stabilizer jam”--could have sent the plane into its wild, corkscrewing descent into the sea near the Channel Islands.

“I’d be hard-pressed to suggest that these people did something wrong, but the procedures are a very important aspect,” the NTSB official said.

“Is it known what you need to do in a situation like the one they found themselves in? Are the procedures correct? We may well be in a situation in which no one knew what to do.”

Flight 261 was midway on its route from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, to San Francisco when the crew reported mechanical problems and requested permission to land at LAX.

The flight data recording being analyzed by the safety board shows that the pilots were grappling with control problems for the full 30 minutes covered by the recording, and had appeared to stabilize the plane for seven to nine minutes before something went badly wrong.

In the minutes leading up to the crash, “The airplane’s out-of-trim condition became worse as the crew attempted to diagnose and correct the problem,” NTSB Chairman Jim Hall told reporters in Washington.

“The crew had difficulty controlling the airplane’s tendency to pitch down, but the crew was able to arrest the descent. The crew continued trouble-shooting and preparing the airplane for landing. Then control was suddenly lost. The crew made references to being inverted that are consistent with witnesses’ statement to that effect.”

Three pilots flying near the falling plane described it flying upside-down and corkscrewing, safety officials had said earlier.

That could be consistent with what would happen when pilots prepare a plane for landing while its horizontal stabilizer is jammed, safety officials said.

The horizontal stabilizer is a wing-like device located in the plane’s tail. It helps control the “attitude” of the jet--the up or down pitch of its nose. On an MD-83, the type of plane that was being flown on Flight 261, the stabilizer is “trimmed”--that is, shifted--using one of two motors that employ a screw mechanism.

Changes in Procedures Weighed

When a stabilizer jams, one of the recovery procedures is to ready the plane for landing, and this would include deploying flaps, the hinged plates on the back of the wings that give the plane increased lift at lower speed. Deploying the flaps tends to pitch the nose down. If, as seems possible, the plane was already stuck in a nose-down position, deploying the flaps could exacerbate that problem and possibly pitch the plane into a dive, officials at the Boeing Corp. said in a background briefing for reporters.

The Alaska Airlines plane was built by McDonnell Douglas, which has since been purchased by Boeing.

Bernard Loeb, director of aviation safety for NTSB, said the agency is already looking at changing the procedures for getting a plane on the ground in the situation faced by the Alaska crew. “That is certainly something we are looking at very carefully,” he said. “We are going to look at what has been done and what may need to be different.”

NTSB officials caution, as they always do in the days immediately after a major crash, that it is premature to draw any conclusions about the cause. But what may set apart the crash of Flight 261 is how quickly the crash investigators have learned essential information about the flight, and the rapidity with which they have been able to draw up detailed--if preliminary--scenarios about what went wrong.

John Hammerschmidt, the top NTSB official in Port Hueneme, where the investigation is based, said investigators had interviewed a mechanic at LAX who had coached the crew of the doomed flight as it grappled with the horizontal stabilizer problem.

The crew complained that the trim mechanism was stuck in the down position and that it couldn’t be disabled or reversed, the unidentified mechanic said. He recalled the pilot telling him, “We are in a worse situation than we were before.”

Hammerschmidt also said investigators had interviewed the pilot and co-pilot who flew the Alaska Airlines jet on the two previous flight legs before the flight that crashed. Contrary to an early newspaper account, they said they had experienced no mechanical problems on those flights.

The investigation took another giant step forward Thursday when an underwater robot found and retrieved the flight data recorder, which should contain vital technical information about the flight--such details as the power and control settings, airspeed, altitude and pitch, fuel consumption rate and G-forces.

“We’re extremely pleased to have the recorder in hand so soon,” Hammerschmidt said. “It should be a critical source of valuable information.”

Remarkably Quick Recovery

The search for black boxes has often frustrated investigators in ocean crashes. It took a week to find the flight recorders after TWA Flight 800 crashed off Long Island, N.Y., in 1996 and two weeks to recover both recorders after the crash of EgyptAir Flight 990 off the coast of Massachusetts last fall.

The quick recovery of Flight 261’s data recorder was all the more remarkable because a pinger designed to guide recovery efforts had been severed and was lying by itself on the ocean floor. Newer models of black boxes--called that despite their bright orange color--have the pingers more securely fastened, and NTSB Chairman Hall called Thursday for changes in the older units that would keep them from separating in future crashes.

In the course of retrieving the black boxes, the remote-operated submarine Scorpio shot roughly 20 hours of videotape of the wreckage, Hammerschmidt said. Safety officials who reviewed the tape said they could see pieces of the plane’s tail, including parts of the horizontal and vertical stabilizers and, eerily, the familiar Alaska Airways logo of the face of a Native Alaskan.

He said most of the pieces of the plane were 3 feet across or smaller, although there was one intact section of the fuselage that was the width of four or five windows.

Hammerschmidt said NTSB investigators also had determined the cause of a problem aboard an American Airlines plane that made an emergency landing in Phoenix on Wednesday after reporting a horizontal stabilizer jam. The plane, an MD-83 similar to the one that crashed off Ventura, was found to have a short-circuit in the switch used by the co-pilot to operate the stabilizer trim mechanism.

The pilots of that flight shut off the stabilizer system and landed using other controls.

At his briefing in Washington on Thursday, Hall said the NTSB had reviewed the flight data recorder from the American flight and that it suggested the stabilizer was “unresponsive or intermittent,” but was within the normal range. In other words, it might have been jammed, but not in a severe nose-up or nose-down position, so the challenge facing the pilots was considerably easier than it might have been.

“Our interest in this incident is, of course, heightened because of possible similarities between this incident and the one experienced by the crew of the Alaska Airlines Flight 261,” Hall said. However, he stressed that it was too early to say if the two incidents were related.

Other MD-80 series aircraft have suffered similar problems over the last several years, but none have been blamed for crashes.

While the crash investigation moved swiftly forward, the grieving process for relatives and friends of the victims continued--excruciating at any pace.

With a California Highway Patrol escort leading the way, six buses of the victims’ loved ones wound their way into the Point Mugu Navy base for private mourning near the crash site Thursday afternoon.

About 200 people emerged from buses at Point Mugu’s Family Beach and sat in clusters looking out to sea. Some wandered off alone. Some rolled up their pants and waded out into the green water.

Until an official ceremony, they were together but still alone.

The Coast Guard’s Honor Guard collected roses from family members at a small ceremony near the beach. A Coast Guard helicopter picked up the flowers, flew over the families on shore, and then dropped the petals at the site where their loved ones died, a spokeswoman for the base said.

Seals played in the surf a half-mile offshore.

Overhead, a plane circled, etching a smoke cross and heart into the sunny blue sky.

Ventura County Sheriff’s Department spokesman Eric Nishimoto said several elected officials, including Vice President Al Gore, had expressed interest in meeting with relatives, but none was being allowed to do so Thursday. Dignitaries were expected to be invited to a private family ceremony, but no time had been set for it.

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Times staff writers Tina Dirmann, Anna Gorman and Margaret Talev in Oxnard and Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar in Washington contributed to this story.

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

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Analyzing the Black Boxes

The black boxes from Flight 261 were sent to NTSB headquarters in Washington, D.C., for analysis. The investigation into what caused the crash could take months. Here’s a look at how the information is analyzed:

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Researched by JULIE SHEER/Los Angeles Times

Source: National Transportation Safety Board

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Focus on the Wing Flaps

Investigators theorized Thursday that the pilots of Alaska Airlines Flight 261, while following standard operating procedures, exacerbated the plane’s problem by extending the wing flaps as they descended. The flaps may have increased downward pressure on the nose, which was already being pushed down by the jammed horizontal stabilizer in the tail section.

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Researched by RICHARD O’REILLY / Los Angeles Times