Remembering Redlands Captain Ted Thompson from Flight 261 crash in 2000
-Talking with pilot friends, chapter 2
To really understand the devastating effect a terrible accident can have, it makes sense to look at the people who knew the people we lost. This week we learn from a few of Ted Thompson’s old friends and fellow pilots.
If you are jumping in on this series now, take a few minutes to check up on what happened January 31, 2000 with the Alaskan Airlines Flight 261 heading to Seattle (via San Francisco) from Puerto Vallarta here.
This is a continuous story I have been working on since the end of January, when it was 25 years since the terrible crash happened.
Fateful accidents happen all the time, but I think there are lessons to be learned from looking into one of the ones that people remember here in Redlands. What did it mean, who did it touch, what happened since?Retired Jet America pilot, Pat Gilmore, knew Ted Thompson since 1972 when they were in the Air Force together, and for a 15 years period they both lived in Redlands. “We had a lot in common,” he said.
To understand what kind of person Ted Thompson was, Gilmore described him with words like outgoing, funny, silly but also very determined and a distinguished pilot. “If he wasn’t the center of the party, he made sure he was,” Gilmore said. “He didn’t demand attention, he just made himself known.”
“[Ted] would walk into a room,” he said, and yell out “Here’s Teddy!” in the voice of Jack Nicholson’s from the movie “The Shining.” And after a neck surgery to get his thyroid removed in 1980, “Everybody called [Ted] old zipper neck. And he loved it.”
During flights Thompson would also be the one to lighten the mood. “He was the kind that would just break out in song,” he said. “You would look at him and go, why are you singing, Ted? ‘None of your business’ and he would go back to singing.”
The easy-going personality did not interfere with the professionalism Thompson showed in his work. “He was an excellent pilot,” Gilmore said. “I flew many trips with him in the Air Force and reserve. We were all good but he was gooder.”
At the Air Force Base in Taiwan in 1974 when they were about to fly to the Philippines, at the terminal there were these new things called video games. “The consoles were very big in the passenger terminal,” he said. “And Ted and I and the navigator got hung up on this video game. And the navigator kept saying, ‘Ted, we’ve only got a few minutes until we have to be airborne.’ And he said, ‘Just a minute, I can make this, I can make this!’”
Losing the game was not an option for Ted…
“The game finally defeated him, and he was cursing it all the way out the door,” he said. “We literally had to run all the way to catch our own flight so we could take off on time.”
…until it was.
In 1984, Gilmore described how Thompson was the ground instructor of the MD-80 Aircraft (the same type of airplane that Thompson flew with Alaska Airlines in 2000) and taught the simulator. Back then many of the Airforce pilots were training to fly commercially. “I had him as a ground instructor and I was learning everything about the MD-80 aircraft. Because we had to pass a written exam plus an oral exam about the aircraft and then we had to go to the simulator to practice flying it. And then we went on a real trip and actually flew the airplane with passengers onboard. That all takes about six weeks,” he said. At that point, “I had known Ted for 12 years, and he kind of got me through the program.”
Actually, they helped each other out.
“He told our class, just put your pens down and sit here and listen. But I have to take notes. And my notes were so comprehensive that he looked at me and said, it’s almost as if you were a tape recorder,” Gilmore said. “I drew pictures along the way and put important words in quotes. Once we got through ground school, he asked to see my notebook. [Later] he published a book of notes that was nothing more than a copy of my notes,” he said with a laugh.
As a commercial pilot some trips are sought more after than others. Puerto Vallarta in Mexico where the fatal Alaska Airlines Flight 261 flew back and forth to was one of such trips.
“You had to be super senior to be on trips like that,” Gilmore said. “Because of the layover and the crew get to rest in Puerto Vallarta on a hotel on the beach.”
“Would you rather spend your evening in Dallas or Puerto Vallarta?”
That Monday night of the terrible accident. Pat Gilmore and his wife had just got out of the movies. In 2000 Gilmore flew for Delta and they lived in Bountiful, outside of Salt Lake City. “We walked out of the theatre, down to the car. No sooner than I turned the engine on, they announced that an Alaskan aircraft had ditched off the coast of California,” he said.
He explained as a former Jet American pilot, he would have been an Alaskan Airlines pilot if he and his wife had stayed in California. Instead his wife had convinced them to move to Utah. “I still knew everybody at Alaska and I started emailing friends of mine and they said Ted… Oh my Gosh!”
“So that was the talk of town and everybody was wondering, if it could happen to Ted, it could happen to everybody,” he said. “If he had no control over the airplane, then there was nobody else that could.”
“There have been innumerable pilots put through the same scenario in a simulator and none of them have ever flown out of it,” he added. Though Gilmore himself has imagined, what he described, hopeful scenarios that could have landed the plane. He emphasized that “Monday morning quarterbacking is never right.”
For Gilmore believed that during the distress on the plane, “[Ted] knew he could fix it. He knew he was going to win and even while working stuck it out to the end.”
…until he couldn’t.
When asked whether he and Ted still would be friends today, had the accident not happened. “Oh hell, yeah,” he said. “We were still sending Christmas cards back and forth.”
Back in the 1970’s at the Norton Air Force Base, Larry Tobin was in the same active duty squadron with Ted Thompson.
“I gave Ted Thompson his first buddy ride which is his first ride as an aircraft commander, so he could comfortably ask me questions that he wouldn’t ask an examiner,” said Tobin. The two of them were at Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines on Christmas Eve in the Stag Bar in 1973. If anyone wore a hat, someone would ring a bell and the hat wearer owed a round for the bar. When Santa arrived wearing his Santa hat, he too had to pay for a round. These were the kinds of shenanigans the pilots enjoyed being a part of.
Another year on Christmas Day, Tobin and Thompson were flying to Japan with passengers trying to get home during the busy holidays. “As we get closer to Yokota Air Force Base, there is some traffic congestion so they put us in a holding pattern and Ted puts on his harmonica, and over the PA he is playing Christmas carols,” said Tobin. “The loadmaster in the back told them, ‘You should see the look on these people!’” The passengers had gone from grumpy to a lighter mood thanks to Ted.
Keeping cool in stressful situations is standard procedure, making fun about it too.
Earlier that year, during Tobin’s initial Aircraft Commander evaluation trip, Ted was his co-pilot. They were departing a base in Thailand just after sunset and had a bird strike in their #4 engine. “The resulting compressor stall made the Tower call us to say, Mac, you just shot a giant yellow flame out the back of your airplane! Do you need assistance?’ Tobin said. “I called for gear up, and Ted is describing the bird to me. ‘Gear up!’ Then he raised the gear. The engineer said all indications were now normal, and since it was a war zone, I elected to continue to Kadena Air Force Base, Okinawa, our destination.”
“After landing and parking, the scanner brought me the bird’s wing which had stuck to the engine’s inlet guide vanes. I stapled it to my bird strike report and turned it in,” said Tobin and added, “Who says flying is boring?”
When the accident on January 31, 2000, happened, Tobin was as stunned as anyone else. “Whenever there’s an accident you are always waiting to find out who the crew is and you are hoping you don’t know any names,” he said. “I was shocked that it was Ted.”
The issue with the stabilizer, made Tobin, who after the Air Force worked as a cargo and military passenger pilot, think of ways to fix it. “We did have an emergency procedure on the 141 which had the same sort of set up. On that you were supposed to slow down, pull the elevator and hopefully you would have the stabilizer locked in the far down position.” (As you will see in next week’s chapter, locking the stabilizer in a certain position was trickier than it sounds).
Besides Pat Gilmore and Larry Tobin, a third pilot friend Jerry Burgess also was part of the crew back in the Airforce days. Sadly, Jerry is not with us any longer but his wife Jan Burgess remembered Ted Thompson and what Jerry said at the time.
Burgess remember having seen Ted at the post office two weeks before the crash. “Nice guy,” Burgess said.
Following the news coverage afterwards, “I remember [Ted] saying [from the airplane recording] that he was trying to invert the airplane to see if he could get control back,” she said. “Thinking back, I don’t think Ted ever thought that he wasn’t going to pull it out.”
“But if anyone could have done it, he probably could,” Tobin commented.
“That’s what Jerry said too at the time,” Burgess said. “He had the skills to do it.”
When thinking about the way airplane accidents are dealt with afterwards, there was no doubt in their minds that the work The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is crucial.
“The NTSB is very important. Everyone is so impatient to hear what is going on and they’re absolutely wrong,” said Tobin. “It does take like a year for these big accidents.”
“And when you get the final NTSB report, they are so in depth,” added Burgess.
Next week, we will look at the final NTSB report that came out nearly two years after the incident, December 2022. What did the recordings reveal and what was the cause of the accident?
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