For Alaska Airlines, the crash of Flight 261 into the Pacific Ocean one year ago this week brought down not just a plane but an entire way of operating: fast-growing, brash and full of. Following the crash and the damning FAA special inspection report, Alaska Airlines overhauled its maintenance program, including through its compliance with a new FAA airworthiness directive mandating that the jackscrew lubrication interval not exceed 650 flight hours. Just before plunging into the Pacific Ocean, the crew of Alaska Airlines Flight 261 flew upside down while desperately trying to regain control of the passenger jet, investigators confirmed Thursday. It was clear that nobody had survived the crash. The MD-83 nosed over, rolled inverted, tumbled downward and impacted the Pacific Ocean at 4:21 pm Pacific Time. (Alaska specifically did this every 30 months, or 9,550 flight hours.) With no grease at all, the rate of wear would increase by a factor of ten or more. What a hard way to die: so an airline can make more money., ________________________________________________________________. The pilots pulled back as hard as they could on their control columns and deployed the flaps to try and slow down, but their efforts were utterly hopeless. Please support this channel by following me on Patreonhttps://www.patreon.com/allecibayFollow me on:https://www.facebook.com/allec.ibayhttps://www.instagram.. The NTSB noted that in July 2001, an FAA panel determined that Alaska Airlines had corrected the previously identified deficiencies. The acme nut was constructed from a softer copper alloy containing aluminum, nickel, and bronze. [6], A periodic maintenance inspection called an "end-play check" was used to monitor wear on the jackscrew assembly. An FAA inspector who reviewed the 1996 extension said that the airline presented only Boeings recently extended lube interval as justification. Unfortunately, these components that I needed to examine were laying under 200 feet of water. The FAA approved the extension without assessing the effect this would have on individual inspection tasks that were tied to the C-check interval. [29] In December 2001, federal prosecutors stated that they were not going to file criminal charges against Alaska Airlines. Hands clenching my headphones, I listened to the crew talk among themselves, with airline dispatch and to air traffic controllers in an attempt to keep the airplane kinda stabilized as they put it. citizens. [26], The investigation then proceeded to examine why scheduled maintenance had failed to adequately lubricate the jackscrew assembly. "[6]:8 Later, during the public hearings into the accident, the request by the pilot not to overfly populated areas was mentioned. 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. Finally, the Safety Board also felt that there were lessons to be learned from the actions of the pilots. [6]:1011 First Officer William "Bill" Tansky, 57, had accumulated 8,140 total flight hours, including about 8,060 hours as first officer in the MD-80. [6]:9 The crippled plane had been given a block altitude,[20] and several aircraft in the vicinity had been alerted by ATC to maintain visual contact with the stricken jet. Japan Air Lines Flight 350 was a domestic flight flown by a McDonnell Douglas DC-8-61, registered as JA8061, from Fukuoka Airport in Fukuoka to Haneda Airport in Tokyo. It looks like hes turning hes turning over in front of you now, said the controller. Meanwhile, N963AS continued to fly, and maintenance workers continued to grease the jackscrew every eight months. Families gather in Port Hueneme to honor Alaska Flight 261 crash The pilots didnt want to discover on final approach that the plane was uncontrollable at low speeds. The 88 passengers and crew members aboard Alaska Airlines Flight 261, which crashed off the coast of Ventura County on Jan. 31, 2000, will not soon be forgotten. Different speeds and phases of flight require the stabilizer to apply varying amounts of downforce on the tail in order to keep the plane level, and further adjustments must be made to ensure that the pilots dont have to continuously pull up or push down using the elevators in order to climb or descend. 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. Over the course of the investigation, the NTSB considered a number of potential reasons for the substantial amount of deterioration of the nut thread on the jackscrew assembly, including the substitution by Alaska Airlines (with the approval of the aircraft manufacturer McDonnell Douglas) of Aeroshell 33 grease instead of the previously approved lubricant, Mobilgrease 28. And because of the increased interval between applications of new grease, a jackscrew with insufficient grease couldnt expect to see more until the plane had been in the air for another 2,250 hours. If they lost control again, he didnt want to endanger people on the ground. At 15:55, the dispatcher returned with wind speeds, wind directions, and runway conditions at San Francisco and Los Angeles. As the jackscrew rotates, it moves up or down through the (fixed) acme nut, and this linear motion moves the horizontal stabilizer for the trim system. In fact, by now there were several other airplanes in the area that were keenly watching the unfolding situation. If the end play is over 0.040 inch, the $80,000 jackscrew/nut assembly must be replaced. The CEO of Alaska Airlines, Brad Tilden, joined them and read a public apology to the families on behalf of the airline. But neither of the applicable checklists said anything about landing at the nearest available airport, and by the time they finished the checklists and leveled off at 31,000 feet, minimal effort was required to keep the plane flying level. 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. More than half of these were directly related to jackscrew lubrication and end-play measurement. I need everything picked up and everybody strapped down, he said, cause Im gonna unload the airplane and see if we can gain control of it that way. His intention was to fly at lower speeds where there would be less aerodynamic force pushing up on the stabilizer. "[21] Although the CVR captured the co-pilot saying "mayday", no radio communications were received from the flight crew during the final event. Alaska flight 261 departed Puerto Vallarta, Mexico at 1:37 pm on January 31, 2000 destined for San Francisco. Talk about lessons learned! The jackscrew was constructed from case-hardened steel and is 22in (56cm) long and 1.5in (3.8cm) in diameter. Both of these circumstances resulted from Alaska Airlines' attempts to cut costs. Yeah, I heard it, said Thompson. 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. [5] Captain Theodore "Ted" Thompson, 53, had accrued 17,750 flight hours, and had more than 4,000 hours experience flying MD-80s.
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