On Jan. 31, 2000, Alaska Airlines Flight 261, bound for Seattle from a Mexican resort town, plunged into the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California, with all 88 souls on board lost.
The flight had taken off from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, heading for the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport with a stop scheduled in San Francisco. Over half of the people onboard were heading to Seattle, and three of the crew members were Seattle based.
Among the 88 killed were Alaskan Morris Thompson, who had been commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Alaska from 1973 to 1976, along with his wife Thelma and daughter Sheryl. Thompson had recently retired as the CEO of Doyon Ltd., a Native corporation in Alaska.
Capt. Ted Thompson and First Officer William Tansky struggled to control the McDonnell Douglas MD-83, for two hours.
“Folks, we have had a flight-control problem up front here,” Thompson announced over the jet’s speaker. The passengers knew it, of course, as the plane had just made a dive from 31,000 feet to 23,000 feet. “We have a jammed stabilizer and we’re maintaining altitude with difficulty…our intention is to land at Los Angeles.”
Thompson radioed to the control tower, but as the pilots attempted to get to redirect to Los Angeles for an emergency landing, the plane went topsy turvy, and then went into an uncontrolled nosedive from 17,000 feet.
Thompson’s final recorded words were “Ah, Here we go.”
The recovered flight recorder data later showed the plane crashed into the ocean at 4:22 pm Pacific time, at about 200 miles per hour.
Read the transcript of the pilots’ communication as they tried to control the aircraft.
The investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board led to problems with a two-foot-long jackscrew, and a lack of grease on the jackscrew, which had caused the threads to be stripped, resulting in the horizontal stabilizer jamming and putting the aircraft in a nose-down position. The aircraft had no backup system to protect it in the event of a loss of the function of the jackscrew.
Alaska Airlines and Boeing, which had bought the McDonnell Corp., ended up settling 87 of the 88 wrongful death lawsuits by 2003. The settlements were sealed but the entire amount was believed to be $300 million. Lawyers for the family pointed out that it was not merely the crash, but that the people on board had gone through two separate free falls of 80 seconds and 90 seconds, adding to the trauma of their deaths. The final lawsuit, brought by the family of passenger Joan Smith, was still in court in 2004 and the outcome is unclear.
Read the account by the leader of the NTSB team that investigated the crash at Aviation Maintenance Magazine.
(Side note, on that fateful day, Alaska Airlines President William Ayers was in the office of the editor of the Juneau Empire, at the same time that the plane went down, a fact he learned about after leaving the building. This writer was the editor of the newspaper and saw the alert on the Associated Press wire just moments after Ayer had departed the building to meet with officials at the Alaska Department of Transportation in the building next door. Ayers was making his rounds of the Capital City during the first few weeks of the legislative session, and learned of the missing plane at about the same time the news was just appearing in newsrooms as an AP alert.)
