Aircraft and Crew
The aircraft involved was a British Aerospace 146-200A, registration N350PS, powered by four Lycoming ALF502R-3 turbofan engines.
The flight crew consisted of Captain Gregg Lindamood (43) and First Officer James Howard Nunn (48). Captain Lindamood had 11,000 flight hours, with 1,500 on the BAe-146. First Officer Nunn had 12,000 flight hours, with 300 on the BAe-146. Three flight attendants were on board: Debbie Nissen Neil (37), Debra Watterson Vuylsteke (32), and Julie Gottesman (20).
Incident
Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 1771 was a scheduled domestic passenger flight from Los Angeles to San Francisco. On December 7, 1987, the aircraft was intentionally crashed in San Luis Obispo County near Cayucos after being hijacked by a passenger.
The perpetrator, David A. Burke, was a former USAir employee. USAir, which had recently purchased Pacific Southwest Airlines, fired 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 Flight 1771. Thompson was a passenger on the flight, which he regularly took for his commute from Los Angeles International Airport (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 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, Burke wrote a message on an airsickness bag. 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." Whether he delivered the note to Thompson before shooting him is unknown.
Details were determined from the cockpit voice recorder (CVR), though poor quality prevented deciphering everything. The CVR recorded the sound of a lavatory door opening, then, as the aircraft cruised at 22,000 feet over the central California coast, two "high-level gunshot-like sound[s]" were picked up. Burke had likely shot Thompson at this time. One of the pilots reported... (recording incomplete).
All 43 passengers and crew on board died. Five of those, including the two pilots, were presumably shot dead before the crash. The motive for the hijacking and mass murder-suicide was anger towards Burke's former boss Ray Thompson, who had refused to reinstate Burke after he was fired for theft. Thompson was on Flight 1771 and was the first victim.
The crash was the second-worst mass murder in California 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.