Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 1771

PSA Flight 1771

N350PS, The aircraft involved seen here in 1986
Hijacking summary
Date	December 7, 1987
Summary	Mass murder-suicide
Site	San Luis Obispo County near Cayucos, California, United States 35°31′20″N 120°51′25″W / 35.52222°N 120.85694°W / 35.52222; -120.85694Coordinates: 35°31′20″N 120°51′25″W / 35.52222°N 120.85694°W / 35.52222; -120.85694
Passengers	38
Crew	5
Fatalities	43 (all, including 4 or 5 shot before impact)
Survivors	0
Aircraft type	British Aerospace 146-200A
Aircraft name	The Smile of
Operator	Pacific Southwest Airlines
Registration	N350PS
Flight origin	Los Angeles International Airport Los Angeles, California
Destination	San Francisco International Airport San Francisco, California

PSA Flight 1771 was a British Aerospace 146-200A, registration N350PS, on a scheduled flight from Los Angeles, California to San Francisco. On December 7, 1987, it crashed in Cayucos, California, as a result of a murder–suicide by one of the passengers. All 43 passengers and crew aboard the BAe 146 died, five of whom, including the two pilots, were presumably shot dead before the plane crashed. The man who caused the crash, David A. Burke, was a disgruntled former employee of USAir, the parent company of PSA. A dramatization of the incident was portrayed on the TV documentary series, Mayday.

USAir had recently purchased Pacific Southwest Airlines. Burke, an aircraft cleaning specialist, had been recently terminated by USAir for petty theft of $69 from in-flight cocktail receipts and had also been suspected of other theft including receipts totaling thousands of dollars. After meeting with Ray Thomson, his manager, in an unsuccessful attempt to be reinstated, Burke purchased a ticket on PSA flight 1771, a daily flight from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Thomson 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.

Using his unsurrendered USAir employee credentials, Burke, armed with a loaded .44 Magnum revolver that he had borrowed from a co-worker, was able to bypass the normal passenger security checkpoint at Los Angeles International Airport. After boarding the plane, Burke wrote a message on an airsickness bag. It is not known if he gave the message to Thomson to read before shooting him:

As the aircraft, a four-engine British Aerospace BAe 146-200, cruised at 22,000 ft (6,700 m) over the central California coast, the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) recorded the sound of someone entering and then leaving the lavatory. The Mayday episode suggests that this was Burke entering the lavatory to draw his revolver discreetly, possibly loading it and giving Thomson time to read the note before killing him. 44-year-old pilot Gregg Lindamood and 48-year-old co-pilot James Nunn were asking air traffic control about turbulence when the CVR picked up the sound of two shots being fired in the cabin.