Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 1771 facts for kids
N350PS, the aircraft involved,
at Los Angeles International Airport in 1986 |
|
| Hijacking summary | |
|---|---|
| Date | 7 December 1987 |
| Place | San Luis Obispo County near Cayucos, California, U.S. 35°31′20″N 120°51′25″W / 35.52222°N 120.85694°W |
| Passengers | 38 |
| Crew | 5 |
| Fatalities | 43 |
| Survivors | 0 |
| Aircraft type | British Aerospace 146-200A |
| Aircraft name | The Smile of Stockton |
| Airline/user | Pacific Southwest Airlines |
| Registration | N350PS |
| Flew from | Los Angeles International Airport, California, U.S. |
| Flying to | San Francisco International Airport, California, U.S. |
Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 1771 was a scheduled flight along the West Coast of the United States, from Los Angeles, California, to San Francisco. On 7 December 1987, the British Aerospace 146-200A, registration N350PS, crashed in San Luis Obispo County near Cayucos, after being hijacked by a passenger.
All 43 passengers and crew aboard the plane died, five of whom, including the two pilots, were presumably shot dead before the plane crashed. The perpetrator, David Burke, was a disgruntled former employee of USAir, the parent company of Pacific Southwest Airlines.
USAir terminated David A. Burke, a ticketing agent, for petty theft of $69 from in-flight cocktail receipts. After meeting with Ray Thomson, his manager, in an unsuccessful attempt to be reinstated, Burke purchased a ticket on PSA Flight 1771, a daily flight from Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) to San Francisco International Airport (SFO). Thomson was a passenger on the flight, which he regularly took for his daily commute from his workplace at LAX to his home in the San Francisco Bay Area. Flight 1771 departed from LAX at 15:31 PST, scheduled to arrive in San Francisco at 16:43.
Using USAir employee credentials that he had not yet surrendered, Burke, armed with a Smith & Wesson Model 29 .44 Magnum revolver that he had borrowed from a coworker, was able to bypass the normal passenger security checkpoint at LAX. He gained access to the plane via the locked crew door using the access code scratched above the lock as reported by one of the lawyers representing families of two dead passengers.
After boarding the plane, Burke wrote a message on an airsickness bag, but whether or not he gave the message to Thomson to read before shooting him is unknown. The note read:
Hi Ray. I think it's sort of ironical that we end up like this. I asked for some leniency for my family. Remember? Well, I got none and you'll get none.
The crash was the second-worst mass murder in Californian history, after the similar crash of Pacific Air Lines Flight 773 in 1964.
Aftermath
Several federal laws were passed after the crash, including a law that required "immediate seizure of all airline and airport employee credentials" after an employee's termination, resignation or retirement from an airline or airport position. A policy was also implemented stipulating that all airline flight crew and airport employees were to be subject to the same security measures as airline passengers.
The crash killed the president of Chevron USA, James Sylla, along with three of the company's public-affairs executives. Also killed were three officials of Pacific Bell, prompting many large corporations to create policies to forbid travel by multiple executives on the same flight.
In the "Garden of Hope" section of the Los Osos Valley Memorial Park, a granite and bronze marker honors the 42 victims of Flight 1771, and a number of the passengers and crew are buried in that cemetery.
Dramatization
An episode of the Canadian documentary TV series Mayday titled "I'm the Problem" ("Murder on Board" for UK broadcasts) chronicled the events of Flight 1771 and its ensuing investigation.
Flight 1771 was also dramatised in Aircrash Confidential.
See also
In Spanish: Vuelo 1771 de Pacific Southwest Airlines para niños
