FAA Releases Alaska Airlines Tape
During the final five minutes of Alaska Airlines Flight 261, the crew struggled to keep the plane aloft, regained control and prepared to land before it plunged suddenly into the Pacific Ocean.
The Federal Aviation Administration Wednesday released a recording of the conversation between air traffic controllers and the crew of the MD-83, which crashed north of Los Angeles on Jan. 31. All 88 people aboard were killed.
The flight was three hours into a four-hour trip from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, to San Francisco when the pilots Capt. Ted Thompson, 53, and First Officer William Tansky, 57, reported trouble.
At 4:10 p.m., according to the transcript, the crew reported difficulty controlling the plane and descended to 26,000 feet. Seconds later, Flight 261 reported it was at 23,700 feet.
"We've lost vertical control of our airplane," said one of the pilots, who was not identified on the tape.
About 20 seconds later, the crew reported it had pulled out of the rapid descent, then indicated more problems.
"Yeah, we've got it back under control there—no we don't (unintelligible)," one of the pilots said.
Another 30 seconds later, the crew reported "we've kind of stabilized."
At 4:15 p.m., the pilots were cleared to fly out over the ocean to get ready for an approach into Los Angeles International Airport.
"We're maintaining altitude with difficulty, uh, but, uh, we can maintain altitude we think and our intention is to land at Los Angeles," one of the pilots said.
The flight crew told controllers they needed to get to 10,000 feet, change configuration and set the wing flaps to slow down the plane while over water. The controllers cleared the jet for 17,000 feet and the flight crew responds "Thank you."
That was the final transmission from the plane.
At 4:19 p.m., a pilot in a corporate jet reported Flight 261 was in a dive.
"That plane has just started to do a big, huge plunge," the pilot said. A second pilot in the area said the Alaska Airlines jet "definitely is in a nose-down, uh, position, descending quite rapidly."
Two minutes later, both pilots reported seeing the jet hit the water.
"He's, uh, down," one of them said.
Following the crash, the government ordered inspections of more than 1,100 planes in the MD-80, MD-90, DC-9 and Boeing 717 series. Airlines replaced jackscrew devices in the tail sections of 18 aircraft.
National Transportation Safety Board investigators are still probing the crash. They have been closely examining the stabilizer jackscrew, a long, threaded piece of metal that turns to move through a stationary nut.
The jackscrew from the crashed plane had a stripped nut, and the screw itself carried metal shards of the same material as the nut. There also were impact marks on the nut, and the board is trying to determine if the impact marks and strpping occurred before the plane crashed or was caused when it hit the water.
There are suspicions that Alaska's mechanics may have improperly maintained the part, reports CBS News Correspondent Bob Orr.
There is also a growing consensus among crash experts that given the failure the pilots never had a chance.