How the crash changed Alaska Airlines
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ALASKA, which had been flying high, was forced to make sweeping improvements after the crash of Flight 261 brought to light problems with the airline's maintenance operation.
For Alaska Airlines, the crash of Flight 261 into the Pacific Ocean one year ago this week brought down not just a plane but an entire way of operating: fast-growing, brash and full of confidence after pulling in profits and high praise from passengers for years.
The crash, which killed all 88 people on the plane, brought to light deep problems with Alaska's maintenance operation, wreaked havoc with flight schedules, tarnished the airline's bright reputation for quality and contributed to the company's first financial loss in seven years, only its third since 1973.
Threatened with the possible closure of its major repair centers by federal regulators, the Seattle-based airline was forced to make sweeping improvements. Immediately, it had to shelve expansion plans to focus on simply running the airline smoothly.
Now, as families of the crash victims mark the one-year anniversary of the tragedy Wednesday, Alaska still faces scrutiny by several government agencies, along with dozens of expensive civil lawsuits. But it's also poised to take on the expansion it had hoped to accomplish last year, adding flights that will increase its overall capacity by 10 percent.
"We are going to come out of this experience a whole lot stronger," Bill Ayer, Alaska's president and chief operating officer, said in an interview Friday.
Ayer acknowledged that the FAA and independent auditors turned up deficiencies that needed correcting, though he said he believes in time the airline would have discovered and corrected the problems.
Even that acknowledgment is evidence of a change within Alaska.
As late as last March, Alaska Chairman John Kelly said he was confident Alaska's maintenance program was "one of the best in the industry."
His assessment was called into question by the release of a scathing "white-glove" audit of Alaska's operations, conducted in April by the Federal Aviation Administration. The report drew no conclusions about the cause of the crash, but it focused on paperwork lapses that it said could lead to catastrophic consequences.
"While outward appearances would indicate this airline is in compliance with Federal Aviation Regulations, there seems to be a basic lack of understanding regarding the complexity of operating an airline of this size," the FAA's report said.
By June, Ayer was conceding "we have had problems."
Alaska's maintenance reforms got FAA approval that month, which allowed the airline to avoid a shutdown that would have crippled its operations.
The crash unmasked shortcomings and spurred changes that Alaska ought to have made sooner, according to John Sluys, chairman of the Alaska branch of the Air Line Pilots Association.
Sluys, a 737 captain, believes Alaska was growing too fast, beyond its capacity to handle the increased traffic. Important posts such as vice president of safety went unfilled for too long, he said.
Alaska revamps
Over the past eight months, Alaska has hired scores of new mechanics and auditors, rewritten its maintenance manual and created new top-level safety positions that have been commonplace at other carriers.
Today, Alaska is a safer operation, according to the FAA.
Alaska is meeting the requirements imposed on it in June and has safeguards in place that make it a better airline, said Herman Ross, assistant flight-standards manager of the FAA's Northwest Mountain Region.
In a recent series of meetings to gauge the carrier's progress, Ross said, it appeared "they were substantially on track."
The only area where the company was lagging was in filling some positions, he said. But the open positions aren't mandatory, and Alaska is aggressively moving toward filling them.
Alaska could be freed of special oversight by April if it is found to be in full compliance at that time, Ross said.
The positive report card is good news for Alaska.
But for now the airline still faces scrutiny on several fronts:
** The National Transportation Safety Board, charged with improving transportation safety, is investigating the cause of the crash. A report is not expected for about a year.
** The FBI and a federal grand jury in San Francisco are continuing a criminal investigation of the crash and Alaska's maintenance practices.
** The FAA is continuing to press actions against the airline and three of its managers for allegedly falsifying maintenance records and violating federal aviation regulations more than a year before the crash. The managers could lose their mechanic's licenses if the allegations are upheld.
** And more than 50 wrongful-death suits stemming from the crash are pending in federal court in California.
Alaska is likely to learn the fate of the criminal investigation first.
Federal prosecutors plan to decide in the next two or three months if they have sufficient evidence to bring a case, said a government official familiar with the investigation.
Focus on jackscrew wear tests
Investigators have been focusing on September 1997 wear tests on the jackscrew assembly of the MD-83 that crashed.
Failure of the jackscrew is a focus of the crash investigation - specifically, whether excessive wear caused the mechanism to jam and led to control problems before the plane plunged into the Pacific Ocean. The jackscrew tilts the plane's horizontal stabilizer, the wing-like device on the tail, up and down to help control the plane's angle of flight.
During the 1997 tests, mechanics overrode an original directive to replace the jackscrew assembly because it was close to its wear limit. Investigators have been trying to determine if mechanics manipulated the results to get the plane back into service, a theory that the mechanics have denied. The FBI and Department of Transportation agents also have been looking at other aspects of Alaska's operations.
The woman who had been leading the investigation, Assistant U.S. Attorney Laura Gonzales, left her job for the private sector in the late fall, prompting some attorneys for Alaska and its employees to speculate that the case had reached a dead end.
Sources close to the case say, indeed, no "smoking gun" supporting a criminal charge had been found at the time Gonzales left.
Just after a new prosecutor, Miles Erhlich, took over the investigation a former Alaska manager testified to the grand jury that a top airline official might have ordered mechanics to find a way to get the MD-83 back into service during the 1997 inspection.
Still, investigators have been unable to corroborate the information, said a federal official familiar with the testimony.
Prosecutors also tried to obtain testimony from Bill Weaver, Alaska's vice president of maintenance, and John Fowler, the company's former executive vice president for technical operations and systems control, issuing grand-jury subpoenas to them late last year. Attorneys for both men have demanded their clients receive immunity from prosecution before testifying, sources said. Otherwise, the two could invoke their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
Both men were called as witnesses - not targets - but nothing would preclude prosecutors from charging them in the future if they weren't given immunity, the sources said.
Ehrlich has been directed to make a final review and recommendation whether to file charges, sources said.
Focus could shift to civil suits
If no criminal charges are filed, the legal focus will shift to civil suits filed by many victims' families accusing Alaska of negligence. Boeing, which now owns McDonnell Douglas, the maker of the MD-83, also is defending itself against allegations that the plane's design was defective.
A resolution of the civil claims is years away, with skirmishing now focused on whether the plaintiffs can collect punitive damages on top of straight compensatory damages covering things such as loss of income and companionship. Punitive damages are sought to punish defendants beyond normal claims.
In recently filed court documents, plaintiffs' attorneys outlined what they described as the harrowing final moments of the flight to bolster their argument that punitive damages are justified. Boeing and Alaska are asking that punitive damages be ruled out.
According to the documents, the plane's occupants were subjected to excessive gravitational forces during the plane's final descent, in which it flew upside down for more than a minute before diving into the water.
"This magnitude of G forces, normally encountered by seasoned aerobatic and military pilots ... would have thrown the occupants and any unsecured objects (such as laptop computers), toward the cabin ceiling," the briefs say.
Citing a mechanical-engineering consultant, the attorneys also contend violent oscillations would have resulted in cuts, bruises and other injuries.
Such evidence, the attorneys argue, negates a claim by Boeing that punitive damages are unwarranted because the occupants instantly died when they hit the water.
NTSB to continue its probe
As the judge overseeing the case sorts out the arguments, the NTSB will continue its separate probe into the cause of the crash.
In a preliminary hearing late last year, the NTSB took testimony from a parade of witnesses, some of whom raised questions about whether incompatible greases used on the jackscrew caused it to wear at an excessive rate. Everything from the design and maintenance of the plane to the management of the airline also are under review.
Ayer said he derives some comfort in learning that a "chain of actions," not something done by any one person, may have led to Flight 261's fatal dive. While the investigation is not final, such details as the possibility that the corrosiveness of the jackscrew grease may have contributed to the crash have helped to diffuse the sense of individual blame for the tragedy, Ayer said.
"It helps to know what happened and why it happened," he said.
For Ayer, coping with the crash investigation was only one part of the challenge last year. He also had to keep his employees motivated as they struggled to return Alaska's operations to normal.
The FAA last February ordered jackscrews replaced on some MD-80 models, leading to a rash of canceled flights. The resulting schedule disruptions forced Alaska to pull two airplanes out of service for spares, causing further cancellations.
The upshot was that Alaska last year deferred its plan to expand its seat capacity by 6.6 percent in order to focus on fundamentals. The airline's capacity actually shrank by 0.2 percent instead.
The delays and schedule changes aggravated Alaska's customers and strained its employees. At one point in February, people calling reservation centers were put on hold for an average of 11 minutes; the wait has since fallen close to Alaska's goal of 1.5 minutes.
Slipping on-time performance and disgruntled passengers posed huge problems for Alaska. The airline flies to limited geographic regions and carries just 2 percent of all U.S. passengers. Alaska for years had sold itself on quality service, not size.
"We depend on differentiating the product to become successful," Ayer said.
"In other words, we can't become a commodity."
Pilots welcomed scrutiny
Sluys, the 737 captain and pilots-association chairman, said Alaska's pilots welcomed the outside scrutiny because it pushed Alaska to adopt a more methodical blueprint for expanding the airline.
"It was a review we were glad to see take place," Sluys said. "It was something we had asked for and hoped for earlier."
What might have happened if the changes Sluys spoke of had been adopted earlier will never be known.
But what is clear is that the events of Jan. 31, 2000, forever changed Alaska, making it a different airline than the one that existed at 4:14 p.m. that day.
It was at that moment that Capt. Ted Thompson told passengers over the public-address system that Flight 261 would be making an unscheduled landing at Los Angeles International Airport instead of making its way to San Francisco and then Seattle.
"Folks, we have had a flight-control problem up front here," Thompson said. "We're workin' it. Uh, that's Los Angeles off to the right there. That's where we're intending to go. We're pretty busy up here workin' this situation. I don't anticipate any big problems once we get a couple of subsystems on the line, but we will be going to into LAX and I'd anticipate us parking there in about 20 to 30 minutes."
Just after 4:21 p.m., Flight 261 disappeared into the Pacific Ocean.
Steve Miletich's phone number is 206-464-3302. His e-mail address is: smiletich@seattletimes.com.
FACTS
Alaska Airlines
The year past:
** Alaska postponed plans to expand capacity by 10 percent.
** It faced investigations by the National Transportation Safety Board, Federal Aviation Administration, FBI and other agencies.
** It reported it lost nearly $29 million, its first annual loss in seven years and only its third since 1973.
The year ahead:
** A criminal investigation could be resolved by spring.
** Special FAA oversight could end in April.
** Legal wrangling will continue in more than 50 civil lawsuits.
** The cause of the crash could be determined by year's end.
** Alaska will resume expansion plans, increasing its capacity by 10 percent.