Alaska Airlines 261
2017-01-31 04:00:00 PDT Los Angeles -- An Alaska Airlines jet bound for San Francisco from Mexico with 88 people aboard suddenly ran into mechanical trouble near Los Angeles and crashed Monday in the Pacific Ocean off Ventura County.
The Coast Guard reported it has found no survivors, and has recovered seven bodies. In San Francisco, airport officials said 83 passengers and five crew members were aboard the plane. Among the passengers were three infants.
(Some 32 of those aboard were headed to San Francisco, according to a spokesman for the airline). exp-player-logo Read More
Flight 261, an MD-80 aircraft, was apparently trying to turn around and head back to Los Angeles, some 40 miles southeast, when it abruptly went into a nosedive, according to a park ranger who saw it, and then smashed into the Santa Barbara Channel, about 20 miles off Point Mugu, near the Channel Islands.
An officer on a nearby cargo ship said the plane was upside down on the surface of the ocean and then disappeared beneath the waves, leaving debris and a fuel slick floating above.
Airline officials did not have a more specific description of the crash, but at San Francisco International Airport, Mark Topel, 54, of Berkeley, who was checking at the grief center on behalf of a friend from Seattle who was on the flight, said he and his wife were told by airline officials that the plane had broken in two "at a low altitude."
Except for a few scattered pieces of debris that floated benignly on the Pacific's surface, the bulk of the 148-foot-long plane vanished and sank in dark waters estimated to be as much as 800 feet deep, nearly three times the depth of the Atlantic Ocean, off Martha's Vineyard, where Egypt air Flight 990 crashed in October.
And the scene at the crash site: TV news helicopters hovering over rescue boats that moved slowly through a vast field of debris, its angular white bits stark in comparison with the deep green ocean waters. At one point, the cameras panned over a white piece of fuselage, about the size of a dining room table.
After sundown, the high-power lights of commercial squid boats illuminated the darkness as a cutter and small boats continued the search.
In Los Angeles, Coast Guard Captain George Wright, when asked how long someone could survive in the channel's 54-degree water, said simply, "there's always hope there'd be a survivor out there. Miracles have happened in the past, recovering people who seemingly couldn't have survived."
Wright said aircraft will be doing search patterns over the area, expanding the size of the search as the debris field drifts through the channel.
Although the cause of the crash will be under investigation for some time, possibly even years, one possibility focused on a piece of equipment that keeps the plane flying straight.
Jack Evans, an Alaska Airlines spokesman, said from Seattle that "the crew radioed a problem of the stabilizer trim. There were problems with the stabilizer trim."
If the pilots were having trouble trimming the horizontal stabilizer, it would mean that they were having difficulty bringing the plane into the proper pitch up or down.
The stabilizer is brought into balance, or "trimmed," by spinning a wheel in the cockpit. When a plane has the proper trim, its nose will fly level, instead of pitching up or down.
Evans said the aircraft had no previous stabilizer trim problems. He also said the plane had a low-level service check on January 11 and a more thorough check as part of normal maintenance last January.
