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Alaska: The 20-year anniversary of Flight 261; Maintenance error led to the death of 88 By DAVE KIFFER - Twenty years ago this week, an Alaska Airlines MD- 83 crashed in the ocean near Los Angeles on a flight from Puerto Vallarta to San Francisco and Seattle. It was the second deadliest crash in Alaska Airlines history and shined a light on what investigators determined was a lax maintenance regime in the airline.

AK 261 was a scheduled flight from Puerto Vallarta to Seattle with a stop in San Francisco. For a variety of reasons, it was not a full flight and because of that it was packed with people who were connected in some way with Alaska Airlines. Thirty five of the passengers and crew were either Alaska/Horizon employees or their dependents. The crash would cast a pall over the airline for many years.

The plane, a twin-engine McDonnell Douglas MD-83 was less than a decade old and had more than 26,000 flight hours. The crew was very experienced. Captain Ted Thompson, 53, had 17,750 flight hours and 4,000 hours on MD jets. First Officer, Bill Tansky, 57, and more than 8,000 flight hours, the majority of which where in MD jets. There were three flight attendants on board, Alison Shanks, Craig Pulanco and Kristen Mills.

AK 261 left Puerto Vallarta at 1:37 pm Pacific Standard Time. The first leg – to San Francisco – was expected to take just under four hours. The first two hours – at a cruising altitude of 31,000 went as normal, but as the jet was approaching the Los Angeles area, the crew contacted Alaska’s dispatch and maintenance operation in Seattle.

The crew was having trouble with a jammed horizontal stabilizer and was considering diverting to Los Angeles International Airport and landing. The horizontal stabilizer is crucial to keeping a jet stable in flight as pilots can use it to make slight adjustments. In this case, the jammed stabilizer was causing the pilots to keep a constant pressure on the control yoke to keep the plane steady.

With the assistance of the maintenance techs, the pilots tried several things to free the yoke, but they were unsuccessful. Meanwhile, the crew was in contact with the AK Air dispatch office about diverting the flight to Los Angeles.
 
According to the final National Transportation Safety Board report, the dispatch in Seattle expressed concern that not flying directly to San Francisco would exacerbate an existing operational “flow” problem.

That sparked a slightly testy exchange with the pilots, who replied that they were more concerned about not “overflying” a suitable diversion airport than they were about “flow.”

Since the problem with the jammed stabilizer couldn’t be fixed the pilots decided to attempt to land in Los Angeles. As they were making those preparations, the jammed stabilizer broke free. But then it immediately moved into what the report called “an extreme nose down position.”

The jet went into an almost vertical nose-dive that lasted for 80 seconds and took the plane from 31,000 feet to just about 23,000 feet before the pilots managed to regain control of the aircraft.

They continued to prepare the plane for an emergency landing in Los Angeles. In consultation with the LA tower, the crew decided to continue to decrease altitude and prepare for landing, but to do it out over the ocean until they were sure they had the plane under control.

About 15 minutes after the initial dive, a second catastrophe hit the doomed the jet. The report notes that the cockpit voice recorder picked up four distinct “thumps” And then an extremely loud noise. Later it was determined that noise the was sound of the “jackscrew” assembly in the stabilizer completely failing.

The jet pitched into another steep dive, which was witnessed by several other airplanes in the area which had been asked to keep visual contact with AK 261. - More...
Thursday PM - January 30, 2020

Early North Americans May Have Been More Diverse Than Previously Suspected
Original position of the skeletal remains inside submerged cave of Muknal.
Credit: Jerónimo Avilés

Alaska - North America: Early North Americans May Have Been More Diverse Than Previously Suspected - An analysis of four ancient skulls found in Mexico suggests that the first humans to settle in North America were more biologically diverse than scientists had previously believed.

Ancient skulls from the cave systems at Tulum, Mexico suggest that the earliest populations of North America may have already had a high level of morphological diversity, according to a study published January 29, 2020 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Mark Hubbe from Ohio State University, USA, Alejandro Terrazas Mata from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico, and colleagues.

The coastal, mostly-flooded limestone cave system in the city of Tulum in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo encompasses at least eight different sites with ancient human remains (approximately 13-8 kya). After dating and scanning four relatively well-preserved skulls retrieved from different sites within this cave network, Hubbe and colleagues used craniofacial morphology to compare these skulls with a reference dataset of worldwide modern human populations.

The skulls were from individuals who lived 9,000 to 13,000 years ago, in the late Pleistocene and early Holocene eras.

The authors found unexpectedly high diversity among the skulls. While the oldest skull showed close morphological associations with modern arctic North Americans in Greenland and Alaska, the second-oldest skull demonstrated strong affinities with modern European populations--a new finding for early American remains using this type of reference comparison. Of the two remaining skulls, one appeared to show associations with Asian and Native American groups, while the other showed associations to arctic populations in addition to having some modern South American features.

"The first Americans were much more complex, much more diverse than we thought," Hubbe said.

"We have always talked about the settlement of the Americas as if North America and South America were the same. But they are different continents with different stories of how they were settled."

Hubbe led the work with Alejandro Terrazas Mata of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico. Their work was published yesterday (Jan. 29, 2020) in PLOS ONE.

Archaeologists discovered the four skulls between 2008 and 2015 in submerged caves in the state of Quintana Roo, Mexico. At the time the four people were living, the caves were above sea level. - More...
Thursday PM - January 30, 2020

Investigation of West Coast Gray Whale Strandings Continues; Survey counts migrating whales for a new population assessment
Gray whales scoop up and sift through mouthfuls of sea-bottom sediments for food, trailing plumes of mud behind them.
Credit: ASAMM/Alaska Fisheries Science Center,
funded by BOEM IAA No. M11PG00033.

“Blob” Research Reveals Environmental Effects That Shut Down Fishing and Hiked Whale Entanglements
Humpback whales commonly lunge out of the water in pursuit of prey.
Credit: John Calambokidis/Cascadia Research Collective.

Fisheries: “Blob” Research Reveals Environmental Effects That Shut Down Fishing and Hiked Whale Entanglements - An ecological pileup of unprecedented changes in the ocean off the West Coast beginning about 2014 led to record entanglements of humpback and other whales. This put the region’s most valuable commercial fishery at risk, new research shows.

The findings reflect a new management challenge brought about by a changing climate, recovering whale populations, and fishing pressure, according to the new research published in Nature Communications. The situation calls for new measures that alert fishermen to the risk of entanglements and help managers adjust to more rapid and frequent changes in the marine environment.

“We need to put information in the hands of those who can use it, at a time when it can make a difference,” said Jarrod Santora, a research scientist at NOAA Fisheries’ Southwest Fisheries Science Center (SWFSC) in Santa Cruz, California, and lead author of the research “We are seeing changes coming at us in ways they never have before.”

Santora and his colleagues are developing a website that will use oceanographic data to forecast the areas where whales are most likely to be feeding off the West Coast. Crab fishermen could then use the information to help decide where—and where not—to set their traps. It may also help managers decide where and when to open—or close—fishing.

The new research teases out the ecological causes and effects that contributed to the spike in reported whale entanglements. Many involved traps set for Dungeness crab, said Nathan Mantua, a research scientist at the SWFSC and co-author of the research. Reported entanglements have since dropped off but remain higher than before the increase.

“We had all these things that weren’t part of anyone’s experience come together in this remarkable three-year period,” he said.

The entanglements have also prompted environmental lawsuits that threaten to restrict crab fishing. At the same time, though, the focus on entanglements has led to better communication and conversation between fishermen, environmental groups, and managers. This is in due to working groups that have also developed tools to better anticipate and avoid entanglement risk. - More...
Thursday PM - January 30, 2020

2019 Was the 2nd-Hottest Year on Record
This plot shows yearly temperature anomalies from 1880 to 2019, with respect to the 1951-1980 mean, as recorded by NASA, NOAA, the Berkeley Earth research group, the Met Office Hadley Centre (UK), and the Cowtan and Way analysis. Though there are minor variations from year to year, all five temperature records show peaks and valleys in sync with each other. All show rapid warming in the past few decades, and all show the past decade has been the warmest.
Credits: NASA GISS/Gavin Schmidt

Weather: 2019 Was the 2nd-Hottest Year on Record - According to independent analyses by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Earth's global surface temperatures in 2019 were the second warmest since modern recordkeeping began in 1880.

Globally, 2019 temperatures were second only to those of 2016 and continued the planet's long-term warming trend: the past five years have been the warmest of the last 140 years.

This past year, they were 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (0.98 degrees Celsius) warmer than the 1951 to 1980 mean, according to scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York.

“The decade that just ended is clearly the warmest decade on record,” said GISS Director Gavin Schmidt. “Every decade since the 1960s clearly has been warmer than the one before.”

Since the 1880s, the average global surface temperature has risen and the average temperature is now more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit (a bit more than 1 degree Celsius) above that of the late 19th century. For reference, the last Ice Age was about 10 degrees Fahrenheit colder than pre-industrial temperatures.

Using climate models and statistical analysis of global temperature data, scientists have concluded that this increase mostly has been driven by increased emissions into the atmosphere of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases produced by human activities.

“We crossed over into more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit warming territory in 2015 and we are unlikely to go back. This shows that what’s happening is persistent, not a fluke due to some weather phenomenon: we know that the long-term trends are being driven by the increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,” Schmidt said.

Because weather station locations and measurement practices change over time, the interpretation of specific year-to-year global mean temperature differences has some uncertainties. Taking this into account, NASA estimates that 2019’s global mean change is accurate to within 0.1 degrees Fahrenheit, with a 95% certainty level.

Weather dynamics often affect regional temperatures, so not every region on Earth experienced similar amounts of warming. NOAA found the 2019 annual mean temperature for the contiguous 48 United States was the 34th warmest on record, giving it a “warmer than average” classification. The Arctic region has warmed slightly more than three times faster than the rest of the world since 1970. - More...
Thursday PM - January 30, 2020

DANNY TYREE: The ACLU's 100th Birthday - Did you realize that January 19th marked the 100th birthday of that indefatigable advocacy group the American Civil Liberties Union?

People have a visceral reaction to the inescapable headlines about the ACLU; you either love it or hate it. (As in “Yay! I’m being protected from racial profiling” versus “But I didn’t KNOW using the Lord’s name around a SCHOOL of fish was a violation of the separation of church and state!”)

For a full century, the group has worked tirelessly to defend the Constitution of the United States.  Of course, their courting of activist judges shows they view it as a “living document” (unless its mommy doesn’t want it living anymore).

The ACLU wants everyone to enjoy human dignity and breathe freely. (“If your breathing is a tad nonexistent, we can still file an injunction and get you a voter registration card.”)

The nonprofit organization undeniably leans to the left, but its role in society is much more nuanced than that. 

Yes, the ACLU supports affirmative action, adoptions by LGBTQ parents, the Roe v. Wade abortion ruling and bans on school-sanctioned prayers. But it has also worked with the National Rifle Association to prevent creation of a national gun registry, supported the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. FEC (which allowed corporations and unions more political speech rights) and opposes state censorship of Confederate flags.

Is there a single American who doesn’t owe at least a GRUDGING “thank you” to the ACLU, whether it be for the Miranda rights of the accused, more humane treatment of mental illness or attempts to apply the brakes to a government surveillance state?

No one should automatically think of the ACLU as “the enemy,” because we never know when we might have to go running to them for help. (Running – and hopping over the sidewalk piles of excrement left by transient ACLU clients, but running nonetheless.) - More...
Thursday PM - January 30, 2020

Political Cartoon: Coronavirus Groundhog
By Rick McKee ©2020, CagleCartoons.c
Distributed to paid subscribers for publication by Cagle Cartoons, Inc.