Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 1771 was a scheduled domestic passenger flight from Los Angeles to San Francisco. On December 7, 1987, the British Aerospace 146-200A, registration N350PS, was intentionally 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. The crash was the second-worst mass murder in Californian history, after the similar crash of Pacific Air Lines Flight 773 in 1964. It was the second fatal crash of PSA, after Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 182. The motive for the hijacking and resulting mass murder-suicide was anger towards Burke's former boss, Ray Thompson, who had refused to reinstate Burke after he had been fired for theft. Thompson was on Flight 1771 and was the first victim.
== Aircraft and crew == The aircraft involved was a British Aerospace 146-200A. The aircraft was powered by four Lycoming ALF502R-3 turbofan engines. The flight crew consisted of Captain Gregg Lindamood (43) and First Officer James Howard Nunn (48), who had been working for the airline since 1973 and March 1987 respectively. Captain Lindamood had 11,000 flight hours, with 1,500 of them on the BAE-146. First Officer Nunn had 12,000 flight hours, but only 300 of them were on the BAE-146. There were three flight attendants on board: Debbie Nissen Neil (37), Debra Watterson Vuylsteke (32), and Julie Gottesman (20), employed by the airline in 1970, 1977, and 1987 respectively.
== Incident ==
USAir, which had recently purchased Pacific Southwest Airlines (PSA), fired ticketing agent David A. Burke on November 19 for petty theft of $69 from in-flight cocktail receipts. Burke had also been suspected of involvement with a narcotics ring. After meeting with his manager Ray Thompson in an unsuccessful attempt at reinstatement, Burke purchased a ticket for PSA Flight 1771, a daily route from Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) to San Francisco International Airport (SFO). Thompson 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, bypassed the passenger security checkpoint at LAX. He gained access to the plane using a locked crew door with its access code scratched above the lock. After boarding the plane, Burke wrote a message on an airsickness bag, but whether he delivered the message to Thompson 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 exact sequence of events is unknown, although some details were determined based on information from the aircraft's cockpit voice recorder (CVR). Because of the poor quality of the recording, it was not possible to decipher everything spoken in the cockpit, nor was it possible to positively attribute words to specific individuals. First, the sound of the lavatory door opening was heard. It has been speculated that this was Burke loading the gun and giving Thompson time to read the note. As the aircraft, a four-engined British Aerospace BAe 146-200, cruised at 22,000 feet (6,700 m) over the central California coast, the CVR recorded either Captain Lindamood or First Officer Nunn asking air-traffic control about reports of turbulence. During the controller's reply, the CVR picked up two "high-level gunshot-like sound[s]". Burke had likely shot Thompson at this time. One of the pilots reported…