alaska airlines flight 261 crash video

The internal acme nut threads are 1/8-inch thick and are designed to wear out and be replaced. [6]:195197, At 16:09 (00:09 UTC), the flight crew successfully used the primary trim system to unjam the stuck horizontal stabilizer. However, during the 1990s the quality of maintenance at Alaska Airlines began to slip significantly. [26], The investigation then proceeded to examine why scheduled maintenance had failed to adequately lubricate the jackscrew assembly. Were slowing here, and were gonna do a little troubleshooting, can you give me a block altitude between twenty and twenty five?. Gotta get it over again said Thompson. Alaska Airlines now flies from Puerto VallartaSeattle/Tacoma nonstop with Flight 127 and Puerto VallartaSan Francisco nonstop with Flight 1273. The Safety Board also examined the design of the jackscrew itself, and found that it probably didnt meet certification standards. A flight traveling from Mexico crashed into the Pacific Ocean on Jan. 31, 2000. This past January, to honor the victims of flight 261 on its 20th anniversary, hundreds of family members, friends and loved ones came together in Ventura around the Memorial Sundial constructed after the crash. The outcomes of wrongful death suits against Alaska filed by the victims families are unknown, but it has been reported that the airline eventually settled with the families out of court for a total of at least $300 million, all of which was covered by insurance. We are at twenty three seven, request, uh, Thompson said to the controller. Three seconds later, the fairing failed, and the stabilizer swung unimpeded on its hinge to a position of at least 14 degrees aircraft nose down. The original interval was set at every other C-check or 5,000 flight hours. Ah, here we go, said Captain Thompson, uttering the last words captured on the cockpit voice recorder. The investigation found that Alaska Airlines had fabricated tools to be used in the end-play check that did not meet the manufacturer's requirements. [15], Alaska Airlines Flight 261 departed from Puerto Vallarta's Licenciado Gustavo Daz Ordaz International Airport at 13:37 PST (21:37 UTC), and climbed to its intended cruising altitude of flight level310 (31,000 feet or 9,400m). Alaska Airlines Flight 261 - Crash Animation - YouTube Alaska Airlines Flight 261 - Crash Animation,if you liked the video, please subscribe and turn on notifications - I. Testimony from the director of reliability and maintenance programs of Alaska Airlines was that a data-analysis package based on the maintenance history of five sample aircraft was submitted to the FAA to justify the extended period between C-checks. A cacophony of banging and roaring filled the cockpit. What I want to do is get the nose up, and then let the nose fall through and see if we can stab it when its unloaded. It was his belief that the stabilizer might move nose up if there was no aerodynamic force pushing it upward into the nose down position. Had it been inspected after 7,200 flight hours instead of 9,550, the excessive wear would have been discovered before the crash. The aircraft was the 1995th DC-9/MD80 family airframe built,[2] was manufactured and delivered new to Alaska Airlines in 1992, and had logged 26,584 flight hours and 14,315 cycles before the crash. [6], A special inspection conducted by the NTSB in April 2000 of Alaska Airlines uncovered widespread significant deficiencies that "the FAA should have uncovered earlier". However, Alaska Airlines maintenance personnel often did it in as little as one hour not because they found a more efficient way, but because they didnt understand the proper procedure and skipped some of the steps. By 2000, Alaska Airlines only inspected the wear on the jackscrew nut every 30 months, equivalent to 9,550 flight hours, whereas the manufacturer recommended an interval no larger than 7,200 flight hours. The names of Morris Thompson and Ronald and Joyce Lake were used in schemes unrelated to them. Ameet Prasad lost his younger brother . Fuck me!. The stop nut was not designed to hold the aerodynamic tail loads. On January 31st, 2000, Alaska Airlines Flight 261 suddenly nosedived into the Pacific Ocean and the crash had deadly implications. This article is written without reference to and supersedes the original. [29] In December 2001, federal prosecutors stated that they were not going to file criminal charges against Alaska Airlines. As far as the pilots were concerned, the electric motors had probably seized and they could fly on to San Francisco without trimming the stabilizer. The scenes in this video are from the documentary series Air Crash Investigation.None of them belong to me.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Airlines_Fl. It looks like hes turning hes turning over in front of you now, said the controller. [6]:188189, After the crash, Alaska Airlines management said that it hoped to handle the aftermath in a manner similar to that conducted by Swissair after the Swissair Flight 111 accident. The maintenance technician, having received all the information he could get, said, Okay, thank you sir, see you there., Meanwhile, the conversation had apparently encouraged Captain Thompson to try moving the stabilizer again. By carefully measuring the divot, we could accurately determine the wear rates for each type of grease and also the rate from using no grease. On December 22, 1998, federal authorities raided an Alaska Airlines property and seized maintenance records. To evaluate what role grease played in the accelerated wear of the jackscrew, the NTSB formed a Grease Group and conducted standardized tests on both Aeroshell 33 and Mobilgrease 28. A special inspection by the FAA after the accident found further evidence of a massively deficient safety culture at Alaska Airlines. Over time, this minute difference will cause the jackscrew to wear away the threads on the nut if metal-on-metal contact is allowed to occur. That was the last time anyone ever measured the wear on the jackscrew nut on N963AS. The Safety Board found that this unsafe inspection interval was only approved indirectly by the FAA. [21] One pilot radioed, "That plane has just started to do a big huge plunge." Individual maintenance tasks (such as the end-play check) were not separately considered in this extension. My group and I were stunned to see that the acme nut was not attached to the jackscrew. The Price of an Hour: The crash of Alaska Airlines flight 261 | by Admiral Cloudberg | Medium Write Sign In 500 Apologies, but something went wrong on our end. In NTSB board member John J. Goglia's statement for the final report, with which the other three board members concurred, he wrote: This is a maintenance accident. On the basis of these measurements, the shift supervisors overruled Liotines earlier work order and cleared the plane to fly. The airline continued to assess its own safety culture and leadership through the years in what became an obsession to improve safety. Kick! he shouted. We have a jammed stabilizer and were maintaining altitude with difficultyour intention is to land at Los Angeles, Thompson radioed to approach control. Testimony from an FAA inspector regarding an extension granted in 1996 was that Alaska Airlines submitted documentation from McDonnell Douglas as justification for their extension. If they had not attempted to move the stabilizer immediately before the first dive, their chances of safely reaching an airport before the jackscrew failed entirely would have been much greater. Only by applying a continuous maximum nose up elevator input on his control column, a task which required enormous physical effort, was Captain Thompson able to maintain level flight. Captain Thompson argued that conditions would be more suitable for landing at Los Angeles, and the dispatcher admitted that the reason they preferred San Francisco was because a diversion would disrupt flow, worsening mounting delays in Alaskas flight schedule. [6]:11 Thompson had flown for Alaska Airlines for 18 years and Tansky for 15; neither pilot had been involved in an accident or incident prior to the crash. The FDR indicated that the crew flew the airplane manually for over an hour with constant back pressure on the control yoke due to an out-of-trim condition. Did it happen went in reverse? Tansky asked. And then, as the plane passed through 23,400 feet, a warning light flicked on in the cockpit: AUTOPILOT TRIM, it said. The pilots didnt want to discover on final approach that the plane was uncontrollable at low speeds. He ordered it replaced, but the plane was back in service a few days later with the worn assembly. [6], Between 1985 and 1996, Alaska Airlines progressively increased the period between both jackscrew lubrication and end-play checks, with the approval of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Indeed, the final, terrifying dive was the culmination not just of hours of failed troubleshooting, but of years upon years of negligent maintenance, blatant corruption, and lax federal oversight, a deadly combination that led to an unprecedented failure of the stabilizer trim jackscrew one of the scariest malfunctions any flight crew has ever faced. But airline dispatchers in Seattle were less keen on this idea and preferred that flight 261 continue to San Francisco as scheduled. If done correctly, the process took about four hours. We noticed a lot of differences. The result was a chronic problem of Alaska Airlines MD-80s with poorly greased jackscrews. The pilots, 53-year-old Captain Ted Thompson and 57-year-old First Officer Bill Tansky, could not have known that they were about to play out the final chapter in a sordid story that had been building toward its conclusion for years. Navy. Still, the pilots did not give up; Thompson thought it might be possible to roll out right-side-up using the rudder. Okay, well, your discretion, said maintenance. Four minutes later, a warning light illuminated to inform the crew that the autopilot was unable to move the stabilizer. Technical logs fell through the cracks; critical forms were left incomplete; paperwork was outright falsified to show work done when it was not. Indications of questionable maintenance were noted, including the fact that the airline was using a newer type of grease on the jackscrew called Aeroshell 33. Finally, the stabilizer was to be moved repeatedly between full nose up and full nose down so that the nut could spread the grease evenly over the entire jackscrew. Instead it went the other way., What do you think. Okay, we are inverted, and now we gotta get it. PORT HUENEME, Calif. (KABC) -- Tuesday marked the 23rd anniversary of the Alaska Airlines disaster off Port Hueneme in Ventura County. In July 1996, the criteria was changed to 8 calendar months which equated to 2,550 flight hours. The aircraft leveled off at the assigned altitude of 31,000 feet. The turn of the millennium had just come and gone, and the future again seemed limitless. If youve got any hidden circuit breakers wed love to know about em. Over the next couple minutes the pilots reported to maintenance that electrical current was present when they activated the trim motors, but that the motors nevertheless could not move the stabilizer. The NTSB believed that this was inappropriate because each airline operates their airplanes under unique circumstances that require unique FAA oversight and data justification regardless of the manufacturers recommended intervals. Assigned to lead the Systems Group for the NTSB go-team, I needed to understand the crew conversations, cockpit alerts and switch clicks related to what we suspected was a horizontal stabilizer trim system failure. Okay, we had a big bang back there, said the flight attendant. The NTSB examined why the last end-play check on the accident aircraft in September 1997 did not uncover excessive wear. The last minutes of those on board the doomed MD-83 would have been sheer hell, as the plane went inverted, corkscrewed, pirouetted, and spun like a top during its final dive. Meanwhile, N963AS continued to fly, and maintenance workers continued to grease the jackscrew every eight months. . A few seconds before 16:22 (00:22 UTC), Flight 261 hit the Pacific Ocean at high speed, about 14mi (23km; 12nmi) offshore, between the coastal city of Port Hueneme, California, and Anacapa Island. Meanwhile in the cockpit, the pilots tried to figure out what had happened. [46][47] The airline retired the last of its MD-80s in 2008 and now uses Boeing 737s and Airbus A320s for these routes.[48]. The green grease did appear to be more wet to me. National Geographic gets you closer to the stories that matter and past the edge of what's possible through groundbreaking storytelling. Alaska Airlines' extension of its lubrication interval for its McDonnell Douglas MD-80 horizontal stabilizer components, and the FAA's approval of that extension, the last of which was based on McDonnell Douglas's extension of the recommended lubrication interval, increased the likelihood that a missed or inadequate lubrication would result in the near complete deterioration of the jackscrew-assembly acme-nut threads, and therefore, was a direct cause of the excessive wear and contributed to the Alaska Airlines Flight 261 accident; Alaska Airlines's extended end-play check interval and the FAA's approval of that extension, allowed the acme-nut threads to deteriorate to the point of failure without the opportunity for detection; The absence on the McDonnell Douglas MD-80 of a fail-safe mechanism to prevent the catastrophic effects of total acme nut loss. The actual protocol at Alaska Airlines was to inspect the jackscrew for wear at every second C-check, a comprehensive multi-day inspection that every airplane undergoes approximately once a year. Then, additional grease was to be applied to the entire length of the screw, filling all the threads. I think its at the stop, full stop, said Thompson. [6], During this time, the flight crew had several discussions with the company dispatcher about whether to divert to LAX or continue on as planned to SFO. As a result, Alaska Airlines slowly increased the interval between jackscrew lubrications from 500 flight hours in 1987 to every eight months (approximately 2,250 flight hours) in 1999. However, several factors led the board to question "the depth and effectiveness of Alaska Airlines corrective actions" and "the overall adequacy of Alaska Airlines' maintenance program". When the stabilizer moves upward, downforce on the tail decreases, and the nose pitches down; similarly, when the stabilizer moves downward, downforce increases, and the nose pitches up. The following is a list of some of the victims of Alaska Airlines Flight 261. As flight 261 climbed through 23,400 feet at approximately 13:49 that day, the badly worn threads started to tear away from the nut, wrapping themselves around the jackscrew and causing the stabilizer to jam. [6], End-play checks were conducted during a periodic comprehensive airframe overhaul process called a "Ccheck". Increasing the interval between lubrications meant that every lubrication had to be done correctly in order to prevent accelerated wear and tear. Hes in sight, hes, uh, definitely out of control, said the SkyWest pilot. Over the course of a year I dragged the Systems Group all over the country to observe different maintenance shops perform jackscrew lubrications and end-play checks. In August 1999, Alaska Airlines put Liotine on paid leave,[28] and in 2000, Liotine filed a libel suit against the airline. "These are reminders that we should keep telling people that we love them, and let them know how we feel because you never know what's going to happen," he said. The acme nut was constructed from a softer copper alloy containing aluminum, nickel, and bronze. The only layer of protection against a catastrophe was therefore the assumption that poorly trained, low-paid maintenance workers would apply enough grease. In fact, by now there were several other airplanes in the area that were keenly watching the unfolding situation. Finally, the Safety Board also felt that there were lessons to be learned from the actions of the pilots. For the next few minutes, they calculated landing weights and center of gravity and other values while controllers in Los Angeles prepared to accommodate them. And so began a slash-and-burn cost-cutting campaign a campaign that culminated in a terrible black mark which will forever hang over the company, a tragedy so horrible and so preventable that it would call the safety of the entire industry into question. The original interval was 500 flight hours (graphic 12). And so it was that on a sunny day in January 2000, 83 passengers and five crew boarded Alaska Airlines flight 261 in the resort city of Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, bound for San Francisco, California.

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