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A calm 'thank you,' then Alaska 261 fell toward the sea

Thursday, May 25, 2000

By JAMES WALLACE Mail Author
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

The last radio transmission from the pilots of Alaska Airlines Flight 261 to air traffic controllers was a calm "thank you."

Then controllers heard only chilling reports from pilots of other planes who watched the Alaska jet make a horrifying, inverted dive into the Pacific Ocean from 17,900 feet (see graphic).

"That plane has just started to do a huge plunge," the pilot of a corporate jet flying in the same area radioed controllers at 4:19:39 p.m., according to air traffic control tapes released yesterday.

Less than a minute later, he added: "Plane's inverted, sir."

That was followed by this transmission from the crew of a Sky West jet at 4:20:59 p.m.:

"He, ah, hit the water, he's down."

  THE CRASH OF FLIGHT 261 More coverage ...
For the first time, the Federal Aviation Administration made public a transcript of the taped conversations between the doomed jet and air traffic controllers that began soon after Flight 261 took off from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, to Seattle, with a scheduled stop in San Francisco.

All 88 people aboard the MD-83 jetliner, including about 50 from Washington state, died in the Jan. 31 crash off the California coast.

The tapes confirmed much of what is already known about the accident from briefings by the National Transportation Safety Board. But the pilots' words captured their dramatic struggle as they repeatedly lost and then regained control of the plane.

Reporters were allowed to listen to the tapes at the FAA's offices in Washington, D.C. Before the tapes were released, the safety board mailed a transcript to the families of crash victims.

The two pilots of Flight 261, Capt. Ted Thompson, 53, and First Officer William Tansky, 57, were not identified on the air traffic control tapes.

Their first report of a problem came at 4:09:55 p.m., some 11 minutes before the crash. Air traffic control had earlier cleared the jet to maintain its cruising altitude of 31,000 feet.

"Center, Alaska 261, we are, uh, in a dive here," one of the crew told controllers.

The control center asked Flight 261 to repeat the transmission.

"Yeah, we're out of 26,000 feet, we're in a vertical dive -- not a dive yet -- but, uh, we've lost vertical control of our airplane."

That meant the jet had already plunged a mile from its assigned altitude.

Flight 261 was falling at 7,000 feet per minute, more than three times the normal rate of descent for a commercial aircraft.

Reporters who listened to the tapes said the pilot who made the call to controllers sounded winded, underscoring the effort it was taking to control the jet.

Aviation experts have said both pilots may have been pulling back as hard as they could on their control columns to recover the plane from its initial dive when the stabilizer jammed.

The stabilizer is the winglike piece on top of the MD-83 tail that is moved up or down -- "trimmed" -- to help keep the plane stable. A jetliner's nose has a tendency to pitch up or down in flight because of the aerodynamics of the wings.

The flight data recorder on Flight 261 that was recovered after the crash showed the stabilizer jammed in the full up position, which pushed the nose down and caused the jet to suddenly dive. Flight 261 had plunged to about 23,700 before the crew radioed controllers they had regained some control.

"We've got it back under control there," one of the pilots said. But a second or two later, he added, "No we don't."

At 4:15:19 p.m., the crew radioed they would attempt to make an emergency landing at Los Angeles International Airport. The jet was at 22,500 feet.

"L.A., Alaska 261, uh, we're with you, we're at twenty-two-five, we have a jammed stabilizer and we're maintaining altitude with difficulty, uh, but, uh, we can maintain altitude we think and our intention is to land at Los Angeles."

The control tower asked the crew what they wanted to do. The crew said they wanted to descend to about 10,000 feet and remain over the water when they put the flaps down in preparation for landing, referred to in the pilots' transmission as a change in configuration.

"Center, Alaska 261, I need to, uh, get down about ten, change my configuration, make sure I can control the jet and I'd like to do that out here over the bay if I may."

After the jet was cleared down to 17,000 feet, the crew made the final transmission to controllers. It was 4:17 p.m.

"Thank you," one of the pilots said.

Jim Hall, chairman of the safety board, previously said that when the plane was at about 18,000 feet, "things began to happen very quickly." The jet was flying at 270 knots, with its nose pitched down 2.7 degrees and the stabilizer in the full nose-down trim position.

At this point, the pilots extended the flaps to 11 degrees. (Flaps are extended for landing to provide more lift.)

Four seconds after the beginning of the flap deployment, Hall said, the plane began to fall out of control. Its nose pitched down at 26 degrees a second, eventually reaching 70 degrees. The plane experienced a negative force of three G's, or three times the force of gravity.

Flight 261 rolled into an inverted dive and plunged into the ocean in about a minute. The air traffic control tapes captured that final dive from the perspective of several pilots in planes flying in the area.

After the pilot of the corporate jet radioed that the Alaska Airlines plane had just started to make a "big, huge plunge," the pilot of the Sky West jet radioed that Flight 261 was "nose down" and "descending quite rapidly, definitely out of control."

A Navy air controller at the Point Mugu, Calif., Naval Air Weapons Center watched on his radar as the jet plunged into the ocean. His voice is also heard on the tapes, calling out the jet's altitude.

"He's at 7,600 feet. . . . He's at 5,700 (feet) right now 4,600."

The jet hit the water a few miles off Point Mugu some 11 minutes after the crew had first reported the initial dive.

Neither the FAA nor the safety board would comment on the tapes.

Alaska Airlines posted an employee notice on its Web site that the tapes were being released.

"While this information is very personal to all of us, the ongoing National Transportation Safety Board investigation into the accident inhibits what we and others can say so it would be inappropriate at this time . . . to comment on the tapes or transcripts," the airlines said in the notice.

It warned "there will be a high level of coverage and the tapes are likely to be played repeatedly. The coverage may be cold and factual or sensational. But it will have great meaning for the families of all of those lost and for all of us here at Alaska Airlines."

In addition to the safety board probe into the cause of the crash, Alaska Airlines is the subject of a federal criminal investigation of its maintenance practices.

Questions also have been raised by investigators about maintenance work done on the jackscrew mechanism that controlled the movement of the stabilizer on the plane.

The jackscrew is located inside the 40-foot-long stabilizer and runs up and down through a large fixed gimbal nut. Hall has said no grease was found on the operational part of the jackscrew, although Alaska claims pictures of the jackscrew show there was grease on it.

The threads of the nut were found stripped, and metal shreds of the same material were found on the 22-inch-long jackscrew recovered from the ocean.

The flight data recorder suggests that the problem with the stabilizer started early in the flight, but was not considered serious enough for the pilots to land the plane. The stabilizer apparently would only move in one direction -- one that caused the plane's nose to want to pitch down. The pilots would have had to counter this using the elevators that are attached to the rear of the stabilizer.

It is not all that unusual for a modern-day commercial jetliner to experience minor stabilizer problems during flight. But on Flight 261, the problem turned deadly serious when the stabilizer jammed in the full nose-down position.

Aviation experts say the final dive may have been caused when the jammed jackscrew ran suddenly through mechanical stops and the stabilizer deflected to an extreme position.

The safety board is expected to hold its initial hearing into the cause of the crash later this year.

A transcript of what can be heard on the jet's cockpit voice recorder is likely to be released at that hearing.

The board is prohibited by law from releasing the tape from a cockpit voice recorder. In the case of Flight 261, the cockpit voice recorder captured the final 30 minutes of conversations between Capt. Thompson and First Officer Tansky.

The board also has not yet released tapes of conversations the two pilots had with Alaska personnel on the ground in Seattle and in Los Angeles as they tried to troubleshoot the stabilizer problem.

Even though they had already radioed their thanks to controllers, Thompson and Tansky were still talking to an Alaska mechanic when their jet made its final, inverted dive toward the Pacific.

P-I reporter James Wallace can be reached at 206-448-8040 or jameswallace@seattle-pi.com

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