PORT HUENEME, Calif. — The 88 people aboard Alaska Airlines Flight 261 spent the last seconds of their lives in a tumbling, spinning jet headed nearly straight for the Pacific Ocean, an investigator said last night.
Eyewitnesses used words like “tumbling, spinning, nosedive, continuous roll, corkscrewing and inverted” to describe how the plane plunged intothe ocean at an 80-degree angle, National Transportation Safety Board prober John Hammerschmidt said last night.
As the MD-83 jet passed over Anacapa Island, just off the Southern California coast, one witness heard several popping sounds and saw the plane turn and then smack into the Santa Barbara Channel.
“The aircraft was twisting, flying erratically, nose rocking,” Hammerschmidt said.
He added that the plane was in one piece with no sign of fire or smoke when it hit the water.
Navy searchers using a remote-controlled submersible needed just one hour to retrieve the cockpit voice recorder — one of the jet’s “black boxes” — from 700 feet of water.
Search teams were still looking for the plane’s flight-data recorder last night and said they had detected its pinging.
In another development, federal investigators are probing a report that the doomed jet had stabilizer problems on its next-to-last flight.
The NTSB was contacting the pilots who flew the MD-83 down to Mexico — the plane’s last trip before it crashed on its way from Puerto Vallarta to San Francisco.
That crew reportedly told the airline’s maintenance workers about problems with the horizontal stabilizer — which helps control the angle of the jet’s nose.
As the crew if Flight 261 flew the same plane to California Monday, they encountered problems with the same stabilizer. As the pilots tried to fix the problem, the jet crashed into the Pacific, killing all aboard.
Federal investigators also revealed they have tapes of talks between the Flight 261 pilots and a Seattle maintenance crew as the crew frantically tried to keep the jet from crashing.
NTSB Chairman Jim Hall said those scratchy tapes could hold key evidence.
“Obviously, these pilots were struggling to maintain control of this aircraft for a significant period of time,” Hall said. “It’s going to be very important to this investigation to understand why they were unsuccessful in this effort.”
The Coast Guard officially halted its search for survivors and turned its attention to salvaging debris.
An American man living in Puerto Vallarta said he was scheduled to be aboard Flight 261 — but changed plans at the last minute.
“I’m speechless,” said Ken Molinaro, who changed plans and flew to Pittsburgh instead, where his cousin had died.
“I was told to ‘thank your cousin who died; he saved your life.'”
Meanwhile, an American Airlines jet similar to the Alaska Airlines plane made an emergency landing in Phoenix yesterday after the pilot reported a stabilizer problem.