Documents / Hearing transcript

Compilation: transcript, interview, statement, news release

FAA via National Archives / The Black Vault · 9 pages · text by OCR

This FAA compilation, released through The Black Vault, covers an incident on January 29, 1987 involving Alaska Airlines Flight 53. The Boeing 737 was flying from Nome to Anchorage when its crew saw a fast-moving target on their weather radar about 60 miles west of McGrath, Alaska. The file includes an incident record, a certified controller transcript, the FAA's crew interview statement and a news release. Anchorage Center's radar data showed no such aircraft, and the USAF reported no military traffic in the area.

  • p. 2 …LOCATION (City and State) 60 miles west of McGrath, AK 6. COORDINATES 63.20N 157.30W…
  • p. 6 …The incident happened approximately 60 miles west of McGrath, Alaska. The aircraft was operating on a…
  • p. 8 …The incident occured at about 6:39 pm, 60 miles west of the community of McGrath…
The following is a report concerning the incident involving Alaska Airlines Flight 53 (AS53) at approximately 40W MCG on January, 30 1987 at 0340 UTC.

My name is Briggs N. Willoughby (BW). I am employed as the Assistant Manager of Automation by the Federal Aviation Administration at the Anchorage Air Route Traffic Control Center (ARTCC), Anchorage, Alaska.

I have reviewed recorded radar data covering the time and location of the reported incident. I found nothing to indicate that an aircraft performing as reported was present.

Briggs N. Willoughby

Assistant Manager, Automation

Anchorage ARTCC

About this file

Hearing transcript, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. The text was read from the page images by an OCR model; expect the odd misread word. 9 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.