Mourners Arrive for Flight 261 Memorials

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 perished in the crash off the Ventura County coast a year ago Wednesday.

An estimated 850 mourners arrived at area hotels over the weekend and throughout the day Monday. Most live in North America, but some traveled from England, Fiji, the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand.

Starting at 7 a.m. today and Wednesday, mourners will be ferried to the site of the crash. They’ll also be permitted to see wreckage that was taken to a warehouse at Port Hueneme for analysis by federal crash investigators. They’ll attend memorial services and release butterflies and doves to honor those they’ve lost. They’ll eat meals together. And in between, the mourners 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.

“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 handful of other mourners checking into the Holiday Inn in downtown Ventura on Sunday night arrived and found there had been a glitch in the planning and no rooms were available for them that evening. Nelson said the relatives were shuttled to another beach hotel for their first night’s stay.

Although he didn’t get a room until 10:45 p.m., Nelson praised the hotel staff for trying to make amends for the inconvenience.

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 the Point Mugu naval station, 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, construction workers were drilling stakes into the ground to anchor a tent for a memorial service Wednesday afternoon.

A service this afternoon at Pierce Bros. Valley Oaks Memorial Park in Westlake Village is among the events open only to relatives.

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

Much 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.

The families of pilot Ted Thompson and co-pilot Bill Tansky were not expected to attend local events, because Thompson and Tansky were to be memorialized in Seattle by a pilots’ association this week.

The crash occurred at 4:21 p.m. Jan. 31, 2000, on a flight from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. The flight had scheduled stops in San Francisco and then Seattle, but the crew sought an emergency landing in Los Angeles when the Boeing MD-83 experienced problems with its horizontal stabilizer. Trouble with the plane’s jackscrew mechanism and concerns about maintenance and oversight were later cited.

Federal investigators are still sorting through clues to determine just how and why the crash occurred. 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.