PSA Flight 1771
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PSA Flight 1771 was a Pacific Southwest Airlines commercial flight that crashed in California on December 7, 1987. All 44 people onboard the aircraft were killed, including the man who caused the crash, a disgruntled airline employee.
David Burke, an employee of USAir, had been on unpaid leave following an investigation into his theft of $68 from an airline fund. In a hearing on December 7, he was dismissed from his job by his supervisor, Ronald Thompson, even after he pleaded for leniency. As he left his office, he was told to have a nice day, for which he replied, "I intend on having a very good day."
Burke then purchased a ticket on Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 1771, a daily flight from Los Angeles, California to San Francisco, which Ronald Thompson, his supervisor, took daily as he lived in San Francisco and worked at Los Angeles Airport. Using his USAir credentials, he was able to bypass security armed with a loaded .44 Magnum pistol. After he got onto the plane at Los Angeles International Airport, he wrote a note on an air-sickness bag. The note read:
- It's kind of ironical, isn't it? I asked for leniency for my family, remember? Well, I got none, and now you'll get none.
As the plane was cruising in the air at 29,000 feet, Burke left his chair and headed to the lavatory, dropping the note on Thompson's lap. As he exited the lavatory a few moments later, Burke took out his handgun and shot Thompson, as the cockpit voice recorder later confirmed. He then opened the cockpit door. A female, presumed to be a flight attendant, told the cockpit crew that "we have a problem." The Captain replied with "what kind of problem?" Burke then appeared at the cockpit door and announced "I'm the problem," simultaneously firing two more shots that probably killed the pilots.
Several seconds later, the recorder picked up increasing windscreen noise as the airplane pitched down and began to accelerate. A final gunshot is heard as Burke fatally shoots himself. The plane then descended to 13,000 feet, when, while traveling at Mach 1.2, the aircraft broke apart and crashed in a farmer's field in the Santa Ana Hills near Templeton, California.
It was determined several days later by the FBI (after the discovery of the handgun) that David Burke was responsible for the crash. The accident caused the end of Pacific Southwest Airlines, which in April 1988 was absorbed into USAir. Strict federal laws were passed after the crash, including a law that required "immediate seizure of all airline employee credentials" upon termination from an airline position, and another policy was put into place where all members of any airline flight crew, including the Captain, be subjected to the same security measures as are the passengers.
External links
- AirDisaster.com article (http://www.airdisaster.com/special/special-pa1771.shtml)
- Official NTSB Summary (http://www.ntsb.gov/NTSB/brief.asp?ev_id=20001213X32679&key=1)