Malibu Alaska Airline crash memorial Sunday

A memorial service will be held Sunday afternoon to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the crash of an Alaska Airlines plane in the ocean, about 20 miles southwest of Malibu.

Sunday's 3 p.m. memorial will be held at a sundial monument erected in memory of the 88 victims, on the beach at Port Hueneme, the small Ventura County port where fishermen and recreational boaters put out to sea in a frantic, fruitless search for possible survivors the night of Jan. 31, 2000.

All 88 passengers and crewmembers were apparently alive for about two minutes as the plane's flight controls flipped the MD-83 upside down, and then into a dive. There were no survivors.

Flight 261 was traveling from Puerto Vallarta to San Francisco and on to Seattle when it crashed into the Pacific, between Malibu's western tip and Anacapa Island. A federal investigation found that an Alaska Airlines mechanic's recommendation that a critical screw-gear in the tail be replaced was likely ignored by an airline anxious to save on repair costs.

As friends and relatives prepare to mark Sunday's anniversary, the Seattle Times reported their grief was compounded by revelations that the crash could have been averted had Alaska Airlines been more vigilant in its
maintenance of the plane.

"I am a person who has always taken the high road," Winston Ing, who lost his only child Russell Ing, 28, in the crash, told the Seattle Times. "To find out that it was preventable, that it was motivated by pure greed ... well, you don't go through something like that and remain the same."

In the minutes before the crash, the two pilots reported problems with aircraft's tail-section horizontal stabilizer, which controls the plane's up-and-down movements. The stabilizer is operated by a component called the jackscrew, which consists of a nut that rides up and down a screw as it turns to raise and lower the stabilizer.

Two years earlier, an Alaska Airlines lead mechanic found that the jackscrew on the doomed aircraft had worn out, and ordered it replaced. But the plane was put back in service without his work order completed. The lead mechanic went to federal authorities a year before the crash to claim the airline was cutting back on maintenance and falsifying inspection records and work orders to get planes back into operation faster.

At the time, Alaska Airlines was in a public dispute with its mechanic's union over outsourcing and what the mechanics said was deferred maintenance endangering the flying public.

On that afternoon a decade ago, air traffic controllers at Palmdale cleared the airspace near LAX for an emergency landing, but were relegated to listening to eyewitness reports from other pilots of the plane nosediving upside down, recovering briefly, and then slamming straight into the water.

The crash and recovery effort were clearly visible from Zuma Beach in western Malibu. Helicopters from the Los Angeles County sheriff's and fire departments, and the Coast Guard Los Angeles station, combed the area as the sun set that day.

Fishermen spent hours retrieving wreckage, luggage and dismembered human remains from the channel near Point Mugu, which was atypically calm for the time of year.

In the recovered wreckage, investigators found metal shavings indicating threads on the jackscrew had been stripped, causing the part's failure. When the jackscrew failed, the stabilizer no longer could keep the plane aloft.

After the crash, Alaska said the lead mechanic's order had not been acted upon because a second inspection team had re-tested the jackscrew and fount it was within the legal limits of wear.

In the resulting investigation, the National Transportation Safety Board found that Alaska's failure to properly lubricate and check the jackscrew for wear directly led to the crash. The board also found that the FAA was at fault for failing to properly oversee the airline's maintenance operations.

A criminal investigation, launched after the lead mechanic's complaint about maintenance before the crash, did not lead to charges even after the board posted its findings. According to federal prosecutors, there was no evidence of criminal wrongdoing by the airline or the MD-83's manufacturer in Long Beach, McDonnell Douglas.

Alaska Airlines and Boeing, which had acquired McDonnell Douglas, both agreed to accept legal responsibility for the crash, so the case did not go to trial.

"It hurts that we never got our day in court," Mark Hall, who lost his 19-year-old daughter, Meghann Hall, to the crash, told the Seattle Times.

"There were a lot of corrupt things that happened to bring that plane down and a lot of corrupt things that happened afterward. We realize now that we are not ever going to get justice."