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Crew of Alaska flight heard a `loud noise’ before crash

PORT HUENEME/CALIFORNIA, FEBRUARY 5: The crew of the doomed Alaska Airlines flight heard a "loud noise" at the back of the plane...

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PORT HUENEME/CALIFORNIA, FEBRUARY 5: The crew of the doomed Alaska Airlines flight heard a "loud noise" at the back of the plane just after losing control of the MD-83, officials said Friday. The noise came after the crew of Flight 261 lost vertical control, then regained it, said National Transportation Safety Board investigator John Hammerschmidt.

The information came from the aircraft’s cockpit voice recorder, recovered after the plane plunged into the Pacific near here on Monday, killing 88 people. "After recovery from this loss of vertical control, a flight attendant advised the crew that she had heard a loud noise in the rear of the aircraft," Hammerschmidt told reporters. "The crew acknowledged that they had heard it, too. Slightly more than one minute before the end of the recording, a loud noise can be heard on the recording and the airplane appears to go out of control.”

Hammerschmidt said he would not interpret what that meant. Meanwhile, the underwater search for the aircraft’s remainscontinues. The side-scan sonar "mapping" of the crash debris field several hundred meters (feet) down in the Pacific is almost complete and may be finished later Friday, he said.

"We have images of what appears to be a single, concentrated debris field on the ocean floor, estimated to be about the size of a football field," he said. But Hammerschmidt took issue with reports that the plane’s tail section was found intact.

"To reiterate, the largest piece in this area … seen thus far by the video camera of the remotely operated vehicle, was a section of outside fuselage containing about five windows," he said. He said about two meters (five feet) of the horizontal stabilizer has been seen, along with a forward part of the stabilizer.

Hammerschmidt said another witness to the plane’s corkscrew descent into the ocean has been found, someone who was about 26 kilometers (16 miles) away. As the probe continues, aviation experts are wondering if the pilots could have actually made things worse for Flight 261by following routine procedures.

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An NTSB official told The Los Angeles Times that the investigation is focusing increasingly on the pilots’ actions during their preparation for an emergency landing at Los Angeles International Airport prior to the crash. Investigators told The Times that a by-the-book response to mechanical problems reported by the pilots could have sent the plane into its deadly descent.

When a stabilizer jams, one of the recovery procedures is to ready the plane for landing, including deploying flaps — the hinged plates on the back of the wings which give the plane increased lift at lower speed. But deploying the flaps tends to pitch the nose down. If the plane was already stuck in a nose-down position, activating the flaps could have made things worse, possibly putting the aircraft into a dive, Boeing officials said in a background briefing, according to The Times.

Meanwhile, the owner of the ring found by a fisherman looking for survivors in the aftermath ofthe crash of Alaska Airlines Flight 261 has been identified, the boat’s owner says. The gold Masonic ring belongs to Bob Williams of Poulsbo, Washington State, one of 88 people killed in Monday’s disaster, said Scott Jarvis, owner of the Meridian, a 9.7-meter (32-foot) down-easter. Kevin Marquiss said he found the ring when he joined other commercial squid fishermen late Monday to look for survivors, bodies and debris.

The debris was knee-high in the Meridian. But it wasn’t until Tuesday afternoon when he was cleaning the boat that he found the ring, resting in water and squid ink in one of the boat’s deck hatches. Jarvis did some investigating and determined that the ring belonged to Williams.

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