Doomed Jet’s Malfunction Arises in Yet Another Craft

As recovery efforts continued Sunday at the site of the Alaska Airlines crash off the Ventura County coast, federal investigators retrieved the flight data recorder from another of the airline’s jets that was forced to return to Reno on Saturday evening when the pilot reported problems with the motors on the plane’s horizontal stabilizer.

In the minutes before Alaska Airlines Flight 261’s fatal plunge into the Pacific last Monday, the pilots reported trouble with the MD-83 aircraft’s stabilizer trim and discussed the problem with mechanics as they struggled to regain control of the ill-fated plane.

While mapping and videotaping of the debris field continued in the waters of the Pacific on Sunday, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony officiated at a Mass in Westchester attended by some of the crash victims’ relatives. “When that tragedy hit, we all became members of your family,” Mahony told them. “We became part of your lives and your loss.”

At least three dozen relatives and airline staffers were present in the packed Church of the Visitation. While 88 people lost their lives in the crash, Mahony said, “you are surrounded today by hundreds of friends who do not know you personally.”

After taking communion, several relatives sobbed silently as they knelt during prayer. Many of them exchanged embraces outside the church, where Mahony spoke to them personally.

Throughout Ventura County, worshipers in congregations large and small prayed for the victims, their families and recovery workers.

Nearly all who came said they did not know anyone on the plane but that the proximity of the crash meant it affected the whole community.

Ventura County Sheriff Bob Brooks said in an interview that several more bodies have been pulled from the ocean floor. The total number of bodies recovered so far, however, is still unclear.

At a private briefing for family and friends of the crash victims at a hotel near Los Angeles International Airport, officials with the National Transportation Safety Board said the recovery team had collected many pieces of clothing from the crash, according to one relative who asked not to be identified. The clothing was to be dried quickly and photographed for a catalog that family members can look through.

Another relative, Larry Nelson, a real estate agent and contractor from Lynnwood, Wash., said he did not attend memorial services but went to the hotel because “I just really wanted to be with all the other grieving families.”

Nelson and his stepbrother, David Sipe from Aliso Viejo, lost Nelson’s mother, Charlene Sipe, and her friend Harry Stasinos in the crash.

For two days, it didn’t really hit him, Nelson said. “Then it hit very hard. It was almost like a breakdown. . . . I was really wailing.”

The federal investigation into what went wrong with the Alaska Airlines jet bound from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, to San Francisco and Seattle will be aided by the swift recovery of the two “black boxes” that record flight data and cockpit conversations.

Attention has focused on the trim mechanism that controls the movement of the stabilizer used to maintain the plane’s up-and-down angle of flight.

Twice since the crash, similar MD-80 series aircraft have returned safely to airports shortly after takeoff because of concerns about the stabilizer or a switch that controls it.

An American Airlines MD-83 en route from Phoenix to Dallas-Ft. Worth returned to Phoenix on Wednesday after a switch appeared to be working only intermittently on the co-pilot’s side of the cockpit.

Although there was no problem with the stabilizer itself, American spokeswoman Elizabeth Ninomiya said Sunday that the pilots “elected to turn around and landed safely in Phoenix.”

“I think everyone has an awareness of the issue,” she said.

The problem turned out to be a bad switch on the co-pilot’s control yoke. Mechanics also replaced a motor in the stabilizer, she said. The NTSB sent the American jet’s flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder to its headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Shortly after taking off from Reno-Tahoe International Airport on Saturday evening, the pilots of an Alaska MD-80 jet reported that the motors controlling the horizontal stabilizer were operating “intermittently,” airline spokesman Greg Witter said Sunday.

The plane, bound for Seattle with 140 passengers and five crew members, returned safely to Reno.

“This was not an emergency landing,” Witter said. ‘The airplane turned around out of prudence and due diligence.”

The flight data recorder on the aircraft was retrieved and sent to Washington for analysis, said NTSB spokesman Keith Holloway. Federal investigators also planned to interview the aircraft’s crew about the problem.

Witter said the electric motors probably had overheated after the pilots “double- and triple-checked” the stabilizers before they took off. The overheating causes the motors to shut down until they cool.

Times staff writers Daryl Kelley, Gary Polakovic and Tracy Wilson, and Times Community News reporter Gail Davis contributed to this story.