SEARCHERS FIND DATA RECORDER.

Byline: Jason Kandel Staff Writer

Investigators recovered the second black-box recorder from Alaska Airlines Flight 261 on Thursday and located the horizontal stabilizer suspected of causing the plane to plunge into the ocean off Port Hueneme, officials said.

As the Alaska Airlines crew struggled to fix the jammed pitch stabilizer while losing altitude, they radioed mechanics at Los Angeles International Airport in desperation before the plane flipped upside down and nose-dived into the ocean Monday.

A mechanic thought he heard a crew member say, ``We are in a worse situation than we were,'' said John Hammerschmidt, a member of the National Transportation Safety Board.

Preliminary analysis of the flight voice recorder, found Wednesday, has revealed the crew fought frantically to regain control but eventually the plane flipped and spiraled before crashing into the Pacific.

``The crew made references to being inverted,'' National Transportation Safety Board Chairman James Hall said in Washington, referring to the contents of the recorder.

Also on Thursday, investigators said they have proved false earlier reports that a different crew aboard the MD-83 had problems with the same stabilizer en route to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.

``The pilots reported the plane to be in normal working condition with no malfunctions, and that condition was reported to the crew of Flight 261,'' Hammerschmidt said. ``The bottom line is that (in) two previous flight legs, everything was reported fine.''

Of key interest to searchers is the horizontal stabilizer, which now lies about 700 feet under the Santa Barbara Channel, about nine miles from Point Mugu.

A member of a Navy crew using specialized equipment reported seeing part of the horizontal and vertical stabilizers as comprising the largest piece of the wreckage outside of the fuselage, Hammerschmidt said.

The Alaska Airlines Eskimo logo was visible on the tail.

Among the larger pieces of fuselage was one spanning four to five windows. Other pieces of the plane are five to six feet in length. Most are less than three feet.

Also found was the log book for Flight 261, which investigators hope will provide some detail about what might have happened.

Investigators found the voice and data recorders in close proximity on hard-packed ocean floor. The flight data recorder was en route to Washington, D.C., on Thursday, and officials are expected to have a readout of the data by this morning.

The data recorder, if it is still operational, will provide information about the plane's speed, heading, longitudinal vertical and lateral acceleration, and the stabilizer pitch and trim positions.

``A whole array of different information,'' Hammerschmidt said.

Interviews with mechanics at LAX indicated the extent to which the crew went while in the air.

``When the mechanic was contacted by the crew over an open frequency, the mechanic asked the crew if they had tried various troubleshooting methods available to them,'' Hammerschmidt said. ``They said they had. The crew had asked the mechanic if he knew of any hidden circuit breakers.

Later, the crew said they had just had a ``horizontal stabilizer runaway in the nose down position.''

Investigators said they have figured out that an electrical short caused problems with a stabilizer trim on an American Airlines MD-83 jetliner that had been grounded Wednesday in Phoenix. ``They were unable to trim the nose up, but they could move the stabilizer nose in a down position intermittently,'' Hammerschmidt said.

The problem has been fixed and the plane is now ``fully controllable in flight,'' he said.

When asked whether NTSB officials were advising Alaska Airlines to check stabilizers on MD-83s, Hammerschmidt said, ``We are not ... currently, no.''

Another focus of the search now will be to remove human remains, Hammerschmidt said. The Navy ship Independence, scheduled to leave Port Hueneme on Thursday evening, has the ability to remove human remains and wreckage from the ocean bottom. The ship is expected to be out two to three days.

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Photo: Deepak Joshi of the NTSB and John Scarola of Alaska Airlines prepare the flight data recorder for transportation on the Navy's deep-recovery ship Kellie Chouest on Thursday.

Spike Call/U.S. Navy