March 15, 2025 • 11 mins
Embark on a chilling journey into the heart of one of the most shocking crimes in aviation history with our gripping true crime podcast, *"1771: Descent into Tragedy."* This podcast unravels the harrowing story of David Burke and the tragic events aboard Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 1771 in 1987. Through in-depth research, riveting narration, and exclusive insights, we delve into the motivations, the moments leading up to the catastrophe, and its lasting impact on the aviation industry and the lives of those affected.
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Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Southwest_Airline
https://medium.com/@jennbaxter_69070/murder-in-the-sky-how-one-mans-rage-brought-down-a-plane-759ed697b226s_Flight_1771
https://time.com/archive/6711128/david-burkes-deadly-revenge/
#truecrimepodcast #murdermystery #truecrime #massacre
Follow us on Social Media:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bloodstainedbackstories/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bloodstainedbackstories/
Twitter/X: https://x.com/BloodstaindB
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@bloodstainedbackstories
Discord: https://discord.gg/ByrDwT4pQE
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Southwest_Airline
https://medium.com/@jennbaxter_69070/murder-in-the-sky-how-one-mans-rage-brought-down-a-plane-759ed697b226s_Flight_1771
https://time.com/archive/6711128/david-burkes-deadly-revenge/
#truecrimepodcast #murdermystery #truecrime #massacre
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome back to you Bloodstain Backstories. I'm your host, Jace,
and today we're going to talk about a very interesting case.
Imagine that you were working on an airline and you
get terminated. What are you going to do? Are you
going to file for unemployment? Perhaps you look for another job,
or how about this. You go on a plane, you
(00:21):
kill the pilot and co pilot and cause the plane
to crash and kill everybody on board. Not the option
I would have picked. So let's certainly hope you don't
choose that, but that is the option that David Burke chose.
The only good thing that came out of this tragic
event was that several laws were passed to help prevent
this from happening again. But we'll get into that a
(00:41):
little bit later. Let's hear the story of David Burke
and the disaster of Flight seventeen seventy one. David Burke
was born on May eighteenth, nineteen fifty two. He was
born in England to Jamaican parents. The family later emigrated
to the United States and he worked for US Air
(01:04):
in Rochester, New York. He was suspected a belonging to
a drug smuggling ring and cocaine was being brought from
Jamaica to Rochester through the airline. Yeah, seems pretty plausible
that he was part of that drug ring. Allegedly, David
moved to Los Angeles so that he could avoid some suspicion,
and he never was formally charged with drug smuggling before
(01:28):
the events of Flight seventeen seventy one. Neighbors, former girlfriends,
and law enforcement say that he was a violent man.
He never was married, but he did have seven children
from four different women. Play on player. Now, let's jump
into the plane and the crew. The plane involved was
(01:49):
a British Aerospace one hundred forty six DASH two hundred
A and it was powered by four engines. The crew
was made up of Captain Greg Lindaboud, who was forty three,
and Captain Greg had been working for the airline since
nineteen seventy three and had over eleven thousand flight hours
(02:10):
under his belt, and fifteen hundred of those hours being
on the same plane, which was Flight seventeen seventy one.
The first officer, James Howard Noon, was forty eight and
he had been with the airline since March of nineteen
eighty seven and had twelve thousand flight hours under his belt.
Three hundred were on the same type of aircraft. Also
on board, we had three flight attendants, Debbie Nissan Neil,
(02:34):
who was thirty seven and had worked for the airline
since nineteen seventy, Deborah Waterson Vatsuli, thirty two, who worked
for the airline since nineteen seventy seven, and Julie Gotzman,
who was twenty and had been working for the airline
since nineteen eighty seven. Pacific Southwest Airlines had recently purchased
US Air and David was a ticket agent who worked
(02:56):
for the company for fifteen years when he was terminated
from his own employment for petty theft because because he
stole seventy dollars from in flight cocktail receipts and let's
not suspect it, and let's not forget he was suspected
of being part of a drug ring. The stealing of
the seventy dollars did shock his family and friends, who
(03:16):
said David always seemed to have money. He always drove
a Mercedes and owned several homes in Chile and New York.
A close family friend said David had one hundred dollars
bills in his pockets like some people have pennies. David
had a meeting with his manager, Ray tom as an
attempt to get his job back, but that failed and
they decided he was not going to be rehired. David
(03:38):
then bought a ticket on flight seventeen seventy one. The
flight was a daily flight from Los Angeles International Airport
to San Francisco International Airport. Ray Thompson took that flight
regularly for his daily commute to work from home, and
Ray was on that flight. This day, David borrowed a
gun from a coworker and using his u U Air
(04:00):
credentials which had not been turned in, as a way
to bypass the security checkpoint. One of the lawyers who
represented the two families of the people who died on
the plane reported that day David gained access to the
plane by going through the locked crew door. So now
you must ask yourself, if the door was locked, how
did he gain access? Well, it was quite simple. The
(04:24):
access code was written above the fucking door. That was stupid.
Now let's also remember this is before nine to eleven
and a lot of additional security measures were put in place,
i e. Not Writing the access code above the door
that says stupid as having the code be one two
(04:44):
three four, or your password to your computer being password. Anyhow,
after David boor to the plane, David wrote a note
on an airsickness bag and it was intended for his
ex boss Ray, who was on the plane. The note said, Hi, Ray,
I think it's sort of ironic we end up this way.
I asked for some leniency for my family. Remember well,
(05:05):
I never got it, so you're gonna get none. It
was never known whether the note made it to Ray
or not. Now the precise sequence of events is undetermined,
but we do know some details because of the cockpit
voice recorder. Some of it was very sketchy and hard
to make out, but we are able to make out
(05:27):
some of the things that took place. The first thing
that we heard is the lavatory door opening, and it
is thought that David entered the lavatory to load his gun.
He may have given Ray the note at that time
as well. We don't know. The plane was cruising at
over twenty two thousand feet over the central California coast
and the cockpit voice recorder recorded either the captain or
(05:50):
the first officer asking air traffic control for reports about turbulence,
and then the cockpit voice recorder picked up two high
level gunsot like sounds, and that's when it suspected that
David shot Ray two times. One of the pilots reported
to the controller that there had been gunshots fired aboard
the aircraft. The controller asked the pilots if they wanted
(06:13):
to divert to Monterey they could be heard. Then we
could hear the sounds of the cockpit door being opened
and a female voice, and it's believed that that was
the voice of flight Attendant Neil. The only thing that
they made out was the word captain. And then we
hear a male's voice which could not be made definitively
out to be who, But it is the word problem
(06:37):
that was able to be heard by the FBI transcripts,
and we believe that to be David's voice. The complete
phrase which would have been spoken is I'm the problem,
but the FBI could not definitively say what that was.
And then immediately we hear two more gunshots, and then
after about six more seconds, we hear another gun shot,
and this is when David shot Neil, Linda Mood, and
(07:01):
none in They were either wounded or killed, we don't
know for sure if they were fatal gun shots. Then
we hear the cockpit voice recorder picking up the cockpit
door opening or possibly closing, and a windscreen noise. As
the plane pitched and accelerated, David either pushed a control
column down forcing it to dive, or one of the
(07:23):
pilots who was slumped against it, potentially injured or dead.
And then thirty two seconds after hearing the cockpit door,
a sixth and final gunshot could be heard, and the
only thing that could be determined is that he shot
a passenger in the cabin, and it was speculated that
David shot himself, but that is unlikely since when the
(07:44):
gun was found, a piece of David's fingertip was lodged
in the trigger. This indicated that David was alive and
holding the gun at the moment of impact. It is
thought that he The most probable victim was Douglas Arthur,
who was an off duty pilot that worked for and
it was thought that he was trying to enter the
cockpit to get the plane under the control and get
(08:05):
it out of the dive that it was in the
remainder of the flight recording is sounds of the windscreen
noises and some very distant voices, and at full sixteen
pm on the Santa Rita cattle ranch on a hillside
in Santa Lucia Mountains between Passo Rubbles and Caracos, the
(08:26):
plane crashes. The plane was traveling slightly faster than the
speed of sound, going approximately seven hundred and seventy miles
when it crashed. The plane disintegrated immediately and it was
left a crater two feet deep and four feet across,
and out of the passengers on the plane, only eleven
of them could be recognizable and identified. Based on the
(08:49):
discovery of the pieces of the gun and it spent
six casings that were found and the note that David
had on the air sickness bad, it was distermined that
David was the cause of the crash. David was connected
to the flight by a message left on his a
strained girlfriend's machine and part of his body that was
recovered from the crash site. After the crash of Flight
(09:13):
seventeen seventy one, we have several new laws that are
passed which will help to make things better. One of
those things is that after an employee is terminated resigns
or retires their airline, and their airport credentials must be
seized so that way they are never able to flash
their credentials the way that David did and gain access
(09:33):
to things he shouldn't have. There is also a policy
that has been implemented that all airline flight crew and
airport employees are subject to the same security measures as passengers,
which is great. That allows them to a discut on
employee to not circumvent things and those security checks that
are so vital to catching and preventing things. And there
(09:57):
are also now policies that many larger corporations have implemented
that forbids multiple executives flying on the same flight. Because
the president of Chevron, along with three of the company's
public affair executives were on board that flight and all killed.
There were also three executives from Pacific Bell and they
(10:18):
were all killed. Forty three passengers and crew were killed
that day, all because a person was terminated for taking
seventy dollars. This seems like such a waste and very
sad for the families of the people on board the
ill fated flight. Let us know in the comments below
what you think of both the tragic events that David
(10:40):
Burke cause and the tragedy of Flight seventeen seventy one's crash,
as well as also the new things that were implemented.
We'd love to hear that in the comments below, and
don't forget to check us out on all your favorite
social media platforms. We are on most platforms that you
listen to podcasts to you as well, so give us
a follow. Until next week, I'm your host, Jays and
(11:03):
this has been another episode of blood Stained back Stories
Welcome back to you Bloodstain Backstories. I'm your host, Jace,
and today we're going to talk about a very interesting case.
Imagine that you were working on an airline and you
get terminated. What are you going to do? Are you
going to file for unemployment? Perhaps you look for another job,
or how about this. You go on a plane, you
(00:21):
kill the pilot and co pilot and cause the plane
to crash and kill everybody on board. Not the option
I would have picked. So let's certainly hope you don't
choose that, but that is the option that David Burke chose.
The only good thing that came out of this tragic
event was that several laws were passed to help prevent
this from happening again. But we'll get into that a
(00:41):
little bit later. Let's hear the story of David Burke
and the disaster of Flight seventeen seventy one. David Burke
was born on May eighteenth, nineteen fifty two. He was
born in England to Jamaican parents. The family later emigrated
to the United States and he worked for US Air
(01:04):
in Rochester, New York. He was suspected a belonging to
a drug smuggling ring and cocaine was being brought from
Jamaica to Rochester through the airline. Yeah, seems pretty plausible
that he was part of that drug ring. Allegedly, David
moved to Los Angeles so that he could avoid some suspicion,
and he never was formally charged with drug smuggling before
(01:28):
the events of Flight seventeen seventy one. Neighbors, former girlfriends,
and law enforcement say that he was a violent man.
He never was married, but he did have seven children
from four different women. Play on player. Now, let's jump
into the plane and the crew. The plane involved was
(01:49):
a British Aerospace one hundred forty six DASH two hundred
A and it was powered by four engines. The crew
was made up of Captain Greg Lindaboud, who was forty three,
and Captain Greg had been working for the airline since
nineteen seventy three and had over eleven thousand flight hours
(02:10):
under his belt, and fifteen hundred of those hours being
on the same plane, which was Flight seventeen seventy one.
The first officer, James Howard Noon, was forty eight and
he had been with the airline since March of nineteen
eighty seven and had twelve thousand flight hours under his belt.
Three hundred were on the same type of aircraft. Also
on board, we had three flight attendants, Debbie Nissan Neil,
(02:34):
who was thirty seven and had worked for the airline
since nineteen seventy, Deborah Waterson Vatsuli, thirty two, who worked
for the airline since nineteen seventy seven, and Julie Gotzman,
who was twenty and had been working for the airline
since nineteen eighty seven. Pacific Southwest Airlines had recently purchased
US Air and David was a ticket agent who worked
(02:56):
for the company for fifteen years when he was terminated
from his own employment for petty theft because because he
stole seventy dollars from in flight cocktail receipts and let's
not suspect it, and let's not forget he was suspected
of being part of a drug ring. The stealing of
the seventy dollars did shock his family and friends, who
(03:16):
said David always seemed to have money. He always drove
a Mercedes and owned several homes in Chile and New York.
A close family friend said David had one hundred dollars
bills in his pockets like some people have pennies. David
had a meeting with his manager, Ray tom as an
attempt to get his job back, but that failed and
they decided he was not going to be rehired. David
(03:38):
then bought a ticket on flight seventeen seventy one. The
flight was a daily flight from Los Angeles International Airport
to San Francisco International Airport. Ray Thompson took that flight
regularly for his daily commute to work from home, and
Ray was on that flight. This day, David borrowed a
gun from a coworker and using his u U Air
(04:00):
credentials which had not been turned in, as a way
to bypass the security checkpoint. One of the lawyers who
represented the two families of the people who died on
the plane reported that day David gained access to the
plane by going through the locked crew door. So now
you must ask yourself, if the door was locked, how
did he gain access? Well, it was quite simple. The
(04:24):
access code was written above the fucking door. That was stupid.
Now let's also remember this is before nine to eleven
and a lot of additional security measures were put in place,
i e. Not Writing the access code above the door
that says stupid as having the code be one two
(04:44):
three four, or your password to your computer being password. Anyhow,
after David boor to the plane, David wrote a note
on an airsickness bag and it was intended for his
ex boss Ray, who was on the plane. The note said, Hi, Ray,
I think it's sort of ironic we end up this way.
I asked for some leniency for my family. Remember well,
(05:05):
I never got it, so you're gonna get none. It
was never known whether the note made it to Ray
or not. Now the precise sequence of events is undetermined,
but we do know some details because of the cockpit
voice recorder. Some of it was very sketchy and hard
to make out, but we are able to make out
(05:27):
some of the things that took place. The first thing
that we heard is the lavatory door opening, and it
is thought that David entered the lavatory to load his gun.
He may have given Ray the note at that time
as well. We don't know. The plane was cruising at
over twenty two thousand feet over the central California coast
and the cockpit voice recorder recorded either the captain or
(05:50):
the first officer asking air traffic control for reports about turbulence,
and then the cockpit voice recorder picked up two high
level gunsot like sounds, and that's when it suspected that
David shot Ray two times. One of the pilots reported
to the controller that there had been gunshots fired aboard
the aircraft. The controller asked the pilots if they wanted
(06:13):
to divert to Monterey they could be heard. Then we
could hear the sounds of the cockpit door being opened
and a female voice, and it's believed that that was
the voice of flight Attendant Neil. The only thing that
they made out was the word captain. And then we
hear a male's voice which could not be made definitively
out to be who, But it is the word problem
(06:37):
that was able to be heard by the FBI transcripts,
and we believe that to be David's voice. The complete
phrase which would have been spoken is I'm the problem,
but the FBI could not definitively say what that was.
And then immediately we hear two more gunshots, and then
after about six more seconds, we hear another gun shot,
and this is when David shot Neil, Linda Mood, and
(07:01):
none in They were either wounded or killed, we don't
know for sure if they were fatal gun shots. Then
we hear the cockpit voice recorder picking up the cockpit
door opening or possibly closing, and a windscreen noise. As
the plane pitched and accelerated, David either pushed a control
column down forcing it to dive, or one of the
(07:23):
pilots who was slumped against it, potentially injured or dead.
And then thirty two seconds after hearing the cockpit door,
a sixth and final gunshot could be heard, and the
only thing that could be determined is that he shot
a passenger in the cabin, and it was speculated that
David shot himself, but that is unlikely since when the
(07:44):
gun was found, a piece of David's fingertip was lodged
in the trigger. This indicated that David was alive and
holding the gun at the moment of impact. It is
thought that he The most probable victim was Douglas Arthur,
who was an off duty pilot that worked for and
it was thought that he was trying to enter the
cockpit to get the plane under the control and get
(08:05):
it out of the dive that it was in the
remainder of the flight recording is sounds of the windscreen
noises and some very distant voices, and at full sixteen
pm on the Santa Rita cattle ranch on a hillside
in Santa Lucia Mountains between Passo Rubbles and Caracos, the
(08:26):
plane crashes. The plane was traveling slightly faster than the
speed of sound, going approximately seven hundred and seventy miles
when it crashed. The plane disintegrated immediately and it was
left a crater two feet deep and four feet across,
and out of the passengers on the plane, only eleven
of them could be recognizable and identified. Based on the
(08:49):
discovery of the pieces of the gun and it spent
six casings that were found and the note that David
had on the air sickness bad, it was distermined that
David was the cause of the crash. David was connected
to the flight by a message left on his a
strained girlfriend's machine and part of his body that was
recovered from the crash site. After the crash of Flight
(09:13):
seventeen seventy one, we have several new laws that are
passed which will help to make things better. One of
those things is that after an employee is terminated resigns
or retires their airline, and their airport credentials must be
seized so that way they are never able to flash
their credentials the way that David did and gain access
(09:33):
to things he shouldn't have. There is also a policy
that has been implemented that all airline flight crew and
airport employees are subject to the same security measures as passengers,
which is great. That allows them to a discut on
employee to not circumvent things and those security checks that
are so vital to catching and preventing things. And there
(09:57):
are also now policies that many larger corporations have implemented
that forbids multiple executives flying on the same flight. Because
the president of Chevron, along with three of the company's
public affair executives were on board that flight and all killed.
There were also three executives from Pacific Bell and they
(10:18):
were all killed. Forty three passengers and crew were killed
that day, all because a person was terminated for taking
seventy dollars. This seems like such a waste and very
sad for the families of the people on board the
ill fated flight. Let us know in the comments below
what you think of both the tragic events that David
(10:40):
Burke cause and the tragedy of Flight seventeen seventy one's crash,
as well as also the new things that were implemented.
We'd love to hear that in the comments below, and
don't forget to check us out on all your favorite
social media platforms. We are on most platforms that you
listen to podcasts to you as well, so give us
a follow. Until next week, I'm your host, Jays and
(11:03):
this has been another episode of blood Stained back Stories
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