Remembering: 50th anniversary of Alaska Airlines Flight 1866

Fifty years ago an Alaska Airlines jet crashed into the side of a mountain between Haines and Juneau, ending the lives of 111 souls — all 104 passengers and seven crew members.

Flight 1866 was on the “milk run” from Anchorage to Seattle on Sept. 4, 1971. It had stopped in Cordova and Yakutat, where it loaded passengers and hundreds of pounds of moose meat from a successful hunt, and was to stop in Juneau, Sitka, and on to SeaTac.

Approximately 18 miles west of Juneau it was on approach when an erroneous navigation readout led the crew to descend the jet prematurely. With the pilot following the flight instructions from the control towers in Anchorage, and then Juneau, at approximately 12:15 pm the aircraft struck the eastern slope of ravine in the Chilkat Range  at about 2,500 feet above sea level. The Boeing 727-100 exploded on impact; the investigation revealed that there was not even “a last-second awareness” among the crew that the crash was imminent.

It was the first fatal jet aircraft crash involving Alaska Airlines, and at the time was the deadliest aircraft accident in the United States. It’s still Alaska’s worst air disaster.

Watch old crash footage from Department of Public Safety

The day of the crash was not unlike today’s weather in northern Southeast Alaska along Lynn Canal — foggy and misty, very typical of early September.

First officer Leonard Beach of Seattle was at the controls. He had been with Alaska Airlines for five years. Flight captain Dick Adams, 41, was also from Seattle and had been with Alaska Airlines since 1955, with thousands of flight hours in that particular jet. The flight engineer was James Carlson of Seattle. Beach’s wife Cathy was one of the flight attendants in the passenger cabin of the plane. This was during the days of the Golden Samovar Service, when the flight attendants wore uniforms that paid tribute to the Russian days of Alaska.

After the wreckage was located, the Alaska State Troopers and Juneau National Guardsmen collected the remains and they were flown out in body bags by helicopters to Juneau — with the sound of choppers ferrying the bloody remains for the following week. The identification of the souls onboard took another month; the National Guard Armory in downtown Juneau was converted into a morgue for the gruesome work of matching body parts of 111 people.

The plane, in thousands of pieces, was left on the mountain, where it is today, with still some of the old orange stripes still visible, the colors that Alaska Airlines used back in the day.

Flying into Juneau is still one of the trickiest approaches in the nation, and it’s believed that some of the navigational beacons used at the time were sending inaccurate signals to the crew. The early analysis of the crash was inconclusive, but later it became more clear that the crew had followed the instructions from the Anchorage tower and the Juneau tower to the T. Instead, a curious atmospheric condition may have warped the trajectory of one of the signal beams. The black box recovered from the plane showed no operator error.

The official NTSB report had been filed long before, however, and indicated there may have been human error:

“The National Transportation Safety Board determines that the probable cause of this accident was a display of misleading navigational information concerning the flight’s progress along the localizer course which resulted in a premature descent below obstacle clearance altitude. The origin or nature of the misleading navigational information could not be determined. The Board further concludes that the crew did not use all available navigational aids to check the flight’s progress along the localizer nor were these aids required to be used. The crew also did not perform the required audio identification of the pertinent navigational facilities,” the NTSB final report said.

The crash of Flight 1866 and others in the Chilkat Range led to the installation of a sophisticated pilot program around the Juneau Airport using GPS to calculate precise landing pathways that are used today.

Editor’s note: If you have memories about the crash of Flight 1866, please note them in the comment section below.

PASSENGER/CREW MANIFEST