PSA Flight 1771: Eerily Similar To Shanksville

Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 1771 was a commercial flight that crashed in San Luis Obispo County, California, on December 7, 1987. All 43 people on board the aircraft died, including the man who caused the crash, a disgruntled former employee of USAir, the parent company of PSA.

The cash site was eerily similar to the Shanksville, Pennsylvania, crash site of United Airlines Flight 93 on 9/11/2001. Like Flight 93, PSA 1771 crashed at high speed after a steep dive leaving an impact crater in the ground and the plane disintegrated in small pieces scattering light weight debris (including vital clues to the cause of the crash) up to eight miles from the crash site.

First responder Detective Bill Wammock of the San Luis Obispo County Sheriff’s Office from the video: “Nothing that resembled an airliner... we went on for hours, before we heard the news reports of a missing airliner, believing that we were dealing with a small airplane full of newspapers that had crashed. We saw no pieces of the aircraft that were larger than, maybe, a human hand. It did not look like a passenger aircraft.”