Alaska Airlines Flight 261 Plummets: Maintenance Failure Kills All

Alaska Airlines Flight 261 crashed into the Pacific Ocean off Point Mugu, California, on January 31, 2000, after a catastrophic failure of the horizontal stabilizer jackscrew killed all 88 people aboard. The McDonnell Douglas MD-83 was en route from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, to San Francisco when the flight crew reported problems with the horizontal stabilizer trim system over the ocean. The pilots spent approximately 80 minutes troubleshooting the malfunction while attempting to divert to Los Angeles International Airport. The cockpit voice recorder captured the crew's increasingly desperate efforts to maintain control of the aircraft. In the final minutes, the horizontal stabilizer failed completely, driving the aircraft into an unrecoverable dive. The plane inverted and struck the water at high speed approximately 40 miles northwest of LAX. The investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board determined that the crash was caused by the failure of a component called the acme nut and screw in the horizontal stabilizer trim system. The threads had worn down to the point of failure due to inadequate lubrication and extended maintenance intervals. Alaska Airlines had repeatedly deferred maintenance on the jackscrew assembly, pushing lubrication intervals from every 300 flight hours to every 2,550 flight hours. The NTSB found that both the airline's maintenance practices and the FAA's oversight were inadequate. The crash forced the FAA to mandate emergency inspections of jackscrew assemblies across the entire MD-80 fleet, affecting hundreds of aircraft. It also led to significant tightening of maintenance oversight standards industry-wide. The families of the victims filed wrongsuits that resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements from Boeing and Alaska Airlines.