Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 1771

Pacific Southwest Flight 1771

Illustration of N350PS, The Smile of Stockton
Hijacking summary
Date	December 7, 1987
Type	Suicide hijacking, deliberate crash
Site	San Luis Obispo County, near Cayucos, California +35° 30' 56.73", -120° 51' 19.72"
Passengers	38
Crew	5
Injuries	0
Fatalities	43
Survivors	0
Aircraft type	British Aerospace 146
Operator	PSA
Flight origin	Los Angeles International Airport
Destination	San Francisco International Airport

Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 1771 was a commercial flight that crashed near Cayucos, California, United States, on December 7, 1987, as a result of a murder-suicide scheme by one of the passengers. All 43 people on board the aircraft died. The murderer who caused the crash, David Burke (born May 18, 1952), was an angry former employee of USAir, the parent company of PSA.

Background

Burke had been terminated by USAir, which had recently purchased and was in the process of absorbing Pacific Southwest Airlines, for petty theft of $69 from in-flight cocktail receipts. After meeting with his supervisor in an unsuccessful attempt to be reinstated, he purchased a ticket on PSA Flight 1771, a daily flight from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Burke's supervisor, Raymond F. Thomson, was a passenger on the flight, which he took regularly for his commute from San Francisco to Los Angeles International Airport (LAX).

Using his unsurrendered USAir credentials, Burke, armed with a loaded .44 Magnum revolver that he had borrowed from a co-worker, was able to bypass the security checkpoint at LAX. After boarding the plane, Burke wrote a message on an airsickness bag which read:

Hi Ray. I think it's sort of ironical that we ended up like this. I asked for some leniency for my family. Remember? Well, I got none and you'll get none.

As the plane, a four-engine British Aerospace BAe 146-200, cruised at 22,000 feet (6700 m) over the central California coast, the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) recorded the sound of two shots being fired in the cabin. The cockpit door was opened and a female, presumed to be a flight attendant, told the cockpit crew "We have a problem." The captain replied, "What kind of problem?" Burke then announced "I'm the problem," and fired three more shots that incapacitated or killed the pilots.

Several seconds later, the CVR picked up increasing windscreen noise as the airplane pitched down and accelerated. A final gunshot was heard, and it is speculated that Burke shot himself. The plane descended and crashed nose-first into the hillside of a cattle ranch at 4:16 p.m. in the Santa Lucia Mountains near Paso Robles and Cayucos. The plane was estimated to have crashed at a speed of around 700 mph (1100 km/h, 600 kn), disintegrating instantly. The crash was witnessed by three different people on the ground, all of whom were able to see the plane until a fraction of a second before its impact. Two men in a pickup driving east on Highway 46 saw the plane against a clear blue sky. A third witness, who was very near the impact site never publicly came forward. The plane was completely intact until it crashed, and was traveling at an approximately 70-degree angle toward the south. The plane impacted a rocky hillside, leaving a crater less than 2 feet deep and 4 feet across, presumably where the landing gear struck the ground. Unburnt paper flew everywhere as small aircraft fuel fires burned on the ground. No one survived the crash. The human remains were in very small pieces, the largest of which were feet in shoes. The force of the impact caused such extensive damage that 27 of the passengers were never identified.

After the crash site was located by a CBS News helicopter piloted by Bob Tur, investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) were joined by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). After two days of digging through what was left of the plane, they found a handgun containing six spent bullet casings and the note on the airsickness bag written by Burke, admitting he was responsible for the crash. FBI investigators were also able to lift a print from a fragment of finger stuck in the pistol's trigger guard, which positively identified Burke. In addition to the evidence uncovered at the crash site, other factors surfaced: Burke's co-worker admitted to having lent him the gun, and Burke had also left a farewell message on his girlfriend's telephone answering machine.

David Burke

David Burke

The perpetrator, David Burke, was born May 18, 1952 to Jamaican parents living in Britain.

Previously Burke had worked for an airline in Rochester, New York, where he was a suspect in a drug-smuggling ring that was bringing cocaine from Jamaica to Rochester via the airline. He was never officially charged, but is reported to have relocated to Los Angeles to avoid future suspicions.

Consequences

Several federal laws were passed after the crash, including a law that required "immediate seizure of all airline employee credentials" after termination from an airline position. A policy was also put into place stipulating that all airline flight crew were to be subject to the same security measures as passengers.

The crash killed the president, James R.Sylla, 53, and three other managers of Chevron USA along with three officials of Pacific Bell, which prompted many large corporations to create or revise policies on group travel by executives.

See also

• List of notable accidents and incidents on commercial aircraft
• Pacific Air Lines Flight 773
• FedEx Flight 705

External links

• AirDisaster.com article
• Official NTSB Summary
• PSA Flight 182 & 1771 Memorial Page at The PSA History Museum
• Pre-crash photos of the airliner at airliners.net