Hundreds to Mark Air Crash Anniversary

Hundreds of relatives and friends of the passengers and crew of Alaska Airlines Flight 261 will rise early this morning to begin two days of events memorializing the 88 who died in the crash off the Ventura County coast a year ago Wednesday.

An estimated 850 mourners arrived throughout the weekend and Monday. Some traveled from England, Fiji, the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand.

Today and Wednesday, mourners will be ferried by boat to the site of the crash. They also will be permitted to see wreckage that was taken to a warehouse at Port Hueneme for analysis by federal investigators.

The mourners will attend services and release butterflies and doves in memory of the crash victims. And in between, they will have a chance to lean on one another as they grieve.

“I’m glad I came, because I’ve had time to think about my mom more and do some more healing,” said Larry Nelson of Lynnwood, Wash. Nelson met four other relatives of crash victims during a 35-hour train ride from Seattle over the weekend.

“You could kind of tell” who the other mourners were, he said. “I’d say ‘Are you Flight 261?’ and I didn’t get it wrong, ever. I’d say ‘Who did you lose?’ and I’d tell them who I lost.”

Nelson and a few other mourners arriving at the Holiday Inn in downtown Ventura on Sunday night found that there had been a glitch--no rooms were available that evening. Nelson said the relatives were shuttled to another beach hotel for their first night’s stay.

As mourners checked into their rooms and unpacked, organizers and law enforcement officials were scrambling Monday to finalize details of a highly orchestrated week of events.

At Point Mugu, an 800-pound granite memorial chiseled by the Santa Barbara Monumental Co. has been placed among rocks on a cliff overlooking the water. It will be dedicated Wednesday morning. Nearby, workers were preparing to erect a tent for a memorial service Wednesday afternoon.

Elsewhere on the Navy base, military officials briefed reporters and photographers on what events they could and could not attend and urged them to respect relatives’ privacy.

At the Holiday Inn, airline representatives kept the news media away from mourners on Monday afternoon. The Red Cross and other volunteers were on hand to provide 24-hour counseling and other assistance.

Many of the week’s activities are being paid for by Alaska Airlines, a company spokesman said. But planning for the events was arranged by a committee of family members and hired coordinators, officials said.

Another memorial service, organized by a pilots’ association, will be held in Seattle this week for pilot Ted Thompson and co-pilot Bill Tansky.

The crash occurred at 4:21 p.m. Jan. 31, 2000, on a flight from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. The flight was scheduled to head to San Francisco and then Seattle, but the crew wanted to make an emergency landing in Los Angeles when they experienced problems with the MD-83’s stabilizer.

Federal investigators have also looked into trouble with the plane’s jackscrew mechanism and concerns about maintenance. They are still sorting through clues to determine what caused the crash. The National Transportation Safety Board is expected to issue its final report on the crash later this year.

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Times staff writer Tina Dirmann contributed to this report.