Altitude controls suspected in deadly crash

Pilots struggled for 11 minutes to keep jet aloft, officials say By J. Lynn Lunsford / The Dallas Morning News OXNARD, Calif. - The pilots of Alaska Airlines Flight

Wednesday, February 2nd 2000, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

Pilots struggled for 11 minutes to keep jet aloft, officials say

By J. Lynn Lunsford / The Dallas Morning News

OXNARD, Calif. - The pilots of Alaska Airlines Flight 261 apparently struggled in vain for 11 minutes before losing to a control problem that ended in the deaths of all 88 people aboard.

As search crews continued to sweep the waters of the Pacific Ocean for bodies and wreckage Tuesday, crash investigators began painting a picture of a routine flight that suddenly went out of control while pilots of other airplanes in the area watched in horror.
The McDonnell Douglas MD-80 plunged into the water north of Los Angeles on Monday afternoon. Most of the shattered wreckage sank 700 feet to the bottom of the ocean, but the U.S. Navy reported hearing at least one sonar pinger from a flight recorder.

About a third of the victims on the flight from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, to San Francisco and Seattle were airline employees or their relatives.

National Transportation Safety Board officials confirmed Tuesday that the crew had reported problems with a jammed stabilizer. The stabilizer is the large horizontal surface atop the tail of the MD-80 that can be adjusted up and down to help control altitude.

The problems were so severe that, during an 11-minute period while it traveled up the coast, the jetliner dived from 31,000 feet to around 17,000 feet before it suddenly disappeared from radar.

At one point, the pilots told controllers that they wanted to adjust the plane for a descent while still over water, raising the possibility that they were considering ditching the aircraft in the water before reaching a populated area.

Under sunny skies, Coast Guard and Navy boats plied 36 square miles of the ocean about 10 miles off the Oxnard coast. Some of the smaller craft were scouring the waters around Anacapa Island, where a ranger had reported seeing the jet plunge nose-first into the waves. Helicopters and spotter planes joined the effort.

A Navy research-salvage ship equipped with a sophisticated sonar device and an unmanned submersible probe was en route to the scene from San Diego.

The amount of debris floating off the surface appeared to diminish by the hour, and few large pieces were recovered.

"It's just very minimal," said Cora Fields, spokeswoman for the Point Mugu Naval Air Station. "Lots of sea gulls, I'm sorry to say."

Crews used nets to haul in seat cushions, scraps of clothing, bits of metal and pieces of control panels, all of which filled a dozen bins on the Port Hueneme Pier. Bodies were transported to the Ventura County coroner's office.

As of Tuesday night, four bodies had been found - a man, two women and an infant - along with partial human remains. Coast Guard officials said they would press on through the night with the search for survivors, although hope had faded to the faintest glimmer.
In neighboring Ventura, the American Red Cross organized a team of 50 grief counselors and other volunteers to help relatives of the victims.

"Mostly, we'll do the listening," said Red Cross spokeswoman Bette Hamer. "We'll try to comfort them."

Problems with stabilizers are rare, but they have occasionally resulted in unscheduled landings. In almost every case, the crews were able to disengage the powerful electric motors that drive the stabilizers and land safely.

At least two of those incidents involved MD-80s operated by Fort Worth-based American Airlines, the largest user of MD-80s in the world with a fleet of 259.

In one of those incidents, on April 14, 1991, both the primary and alternate stabilizer motors jammed during a climb. After about five minutes, the stabilizer started working properly on its own. The crew elected to make an emergency landing in Houston, where a key part of the trim system was replaced.

In May 1999, the Federal Aviation Administration ordered airlines to inspect MD-80s for corrosion on a hinge plate between the vertical and horizontal stabilizers. American spokesman John Hotard said the airline found corrosion on a few planes and replaced the plates in those cases. "In our view, this problem would not cause a catastrophic failure," he said.

Alaska Airlines was inspecting its fleet but had not checked out the plane that crashed Monday. A spokesman said that craft was to be checked in June, and an FAA spokesman said it had never been in an accident.

The Associated Press reported that Alaska Airlines has been the subject of an Oakland, Calif., federal grand jury investigation over maintenance and repair records for some MD-80s in the past year.

John Kelly, chairman and CEO of Alaska Airlines, said the plane involved in the crash was not the subject of any investigation.
Pilots and investigators familiar with the jetliner said the degree of difficulty the Alaska Airlines crew was having makes them wonder whether something far more serious than a stabilizer problem was occurring.

"You just have to wonder what was going on," said aviation consultant C.O. Miller, a former longtime senior safety board investigator. "If they couldn't turn that thing off, they were probably having to fight against some hellacious control forces."

The stabilizer is operated by buttons on each pilot's control wheel. A secondary system is used by the airplane's automatic pilot.

Pilots say it is possible for the automatic to begin adjusting the stabilizer without commands from the pilots, but alarms sound in the cockpit if the adjustments exceed certain tolerances. In any event, the primary stabilizer adjustment motor is supposed to be able to overpower the autopilot.

Investigators said they are eager to retrieve the airplane's flight recorders. If they are in good shape, they could provide details about the crew's attempts to save the plane, as well as specific settings of critical flight controls.

Officials said they plan to bring in remotely operated submersibles to videotape the undersea debris field before removing any wreckage but weren't sure when that would happen.

Safety board member John Hammerschmidt, who heads a contingent of accident investigators dispatched from Washington, said that air traffic control tapes had so far yielded the best clues about what might have happened.

Mr. Hammerschmidt said the flight was in contact with the en route air traffic control center outside Los Angeles when the trouble began.

The last routine transmission was at 3:55 p.m. Pacific time, when the airplane was cleared to follow a common route off the coast at a cruising altitude of 31,000 feet.

At 4:10 p.m., the crew reported that it was having control difficulties and had descended below 26,000 feet. A few seconds later, the airplane had dropped to 23,700 feet.

"There was some discussion about their ability to control the airplane," Mr. Hammerschmidt said.

A minute later, the controller asked the condition of the flight. He was told that "they were kind of stabilized and were going to troubleshoot."

They indicated the depths of the concern about being able to maintain altitude when they asked the controller to block off all altitudes for them between 20,000 feet and 25,000 feet.

Four minutes later, when the controller asked Flight 261 if the pilots needed anything else, they responded, " 'We're still working on it,' or something to that effect," Mr. Hammerschmidt said.

At 4:15, the aircraft passed into another controller's airspace.

"Several seconds later, the crew checked in and advised that they had a jammed stabilizer and were experiencing trouble maintaining altitude," Mr. Hammerschmidt said.

At 4:16, in preparation for descending into Los Angeles for an emergency landing, pilots told a controller that they would need to descend to 10,000 feet.

They said they needed to change the configuration of the airplane's controls, possibly to begin extending landing flaps, but they stressed that "they wanted to do it over the bay," Mr. Hammerschmidt said.
The controller cleared Flight 261 to descend to 17,000 feet. Again, the pilots asked for another large block of altitude.

At 4:17, the controller tentatively approved their request, but the crew never replied.
At 4:21, the flight dropped off the radar.
Mr. Hammerschmidt said that investigators hope that interviews with pilots who were in the area will provide them with detailed descriptions about what the airplane was doing.

A SkyWest pilot, as well as another Alaska Airlines pilot who was on the same route, reported seeing the plane go down. At least one other private plane was in the area.

Sources familiar with the investigation said that witnesses reported that during its final three-mile dive into the ocean, the aircraft had become vertical and was perhaps spiraling.

It hit the ocean nose-first, creating a splash that was reportedly 200 feet high.

Experts say that - like the recent crashes of a SwissAir jet and an EgyptAir jet from high altitudes over the Atlantic Ocean - the Alaska Airlines plane is probably in millions of pieces.

At 700 feet, this airplane is far deeper than either of those jets, which could lead to additional problems in recovering wreckage.

Staff writer Paul Pringle and free-lancer Candice Jun in Los Angeles