Original subtitles

3000.

We're not getting any oxygen.

We have the terrain alarm.

We are in an emergency.

This is a true story.

The reconstructions are based

on original cockpit voice recordings

and eyewitness accounts.

No family wants to lose... a loved one.

A daughter, a son.

None of us think it's going to happen to our family.

We read about these horrible crashes,

and we think, "Thank God." You know...

Chances are it won't happen to us.

The odds are in our favour.

- You got it? - Yeah!

- Well, what are you doing? - It just got worse, okay?

In January 2000, an Air Alaska jet

with 88 passengers and crew suffered a catastrophic failure

that tore it from the sky.

A shocking chain of negligence and error that led to disaster.

When a whistleblower mechanic from the airline

tried to sound the alarm about faulty maintenance procedures,

he was suspended from his job.

The investigation exposes deeply worrying shortcomings

in maintenance and regulation

that afflict the airline industry.

It shows how a series of devastating errors

combined to produce a tragic accident,

one that could happen again...

- We're stalled. - I can't release It!

Puerto Vallarta is a popular holiday resort

on the Mexican Pacific coast,

one of several Mexican destinations

served by Alaskan Airlines.

Colleen Werley went there to celebrate a family birthday.

The 34-year-old was a keen traveller

who spoke Spanish well and had visited Mexico many times.

Colleen and the other holiday-makers returning

from Puerto Vallarta settle in for the 4-hour flight to San Francisco.

In the warm afterglow of their holidays,

they are looking to the future.

Colleen and her fiancé Monty were planning

to start a family later that year.

The pilots on flight 261 are very experienced.

Both Captain Ted Thompson, and First Officer Bill Tansky

have thousands of hours flying MD-80s.

They know the plane well.

The MD-83 is one of a successful group of rear engine,

low-wing planes.

Originally launched in 1980,

over 1 100 were delivered worldwide.

- Flaps. - Check. Confirmed.

- Spoilers. - Check. Armed.

But on the 31st of January 2000,

as they prepared Flight 261,

Thompson and Tansky had no idea

that deep in the plane's tail lay a critical weakness.

Colleen Werley and her fiancé Monty

were planning their forthcoming wedding.

They had announced their engagement at Christmas time.

So it was a time for everybody to sort of congratulate them

so we decided we'd have a party for the family.

Abby Miller Bush had visited Mexico with her husband Ryan

and their friends to celebrate her new job at Microsoft.

It's hard to describe...

...how joyful a girl she was.

She was well known for that care that she had in her.

A trait that you can't put a value on.

Dean and I had been there a lot together

and it was the first time that he went without me.

Dean taught me how to play.

He was always up. He told jokes a lot.

People described him kind of as a puppy dog.

Alaska Airlines was a successful carrier

with routes up and down the west coast of America

and into Mexico.

Flight 261 left Puerto Vallarta as a routine flight

with no hint of the danger to come.

The devastating failure that would bring catastrophe

to Flight 261 did not come out of the blue.

In fact, it was the culmination of a chain of mistakes

that began years earlier.

Maintenance procedures at the company had come under scrutiny

two years earlier when a whistleblower

set off an investigation by the Federal Aviation Administration.

But the day Flight 261 left Puerta Vallarta,

the investigation was still underway,

and the whistleblower suspended from his work.

Shortly after takeoff, Captain Thompson

and First Officer Tansky get the first sign of trouble.

The horizontal stabiliser on the tail plane won't move.

The pilots carry out a standard checklist to try and free it.

Stabiliser trim switch.

Normal.

Circuit breakers, reset if tripped.

D-9, D-10, D-11 okay.

The stabiliser on the MD-83 is the 40-foot wide

horizontal surface of the front of the tail.

It's like another wing.

Together with the elevators at the rear of the tail,

the stabiliser is used to adjust the angle

of the plane in flight.

The stabiliser was jammed.

Thompson and Tansky assumed there was a fault

in the electric motors that move it up and down.

They believed they could fix the problem.

They had no idea they were in great danger.

What they dealt with was something that really snuck up on them.

It was not supposed to be a big deal.

If it had been, they would've turned around

and gone back in to the Mexican airfield they came out of.

But they were led down this road

of accepting this problem as a small problem,

so it's perfectly alright to troubleshoot it.

The pilots repeatedly try the two switches

that operate the stabiliser:

The primary motor activated by the switch on the control stick

known as the pickle switch

and the sliding suitcase handles on the central console.

Either system operative?

- No. - Both systems inoperative.

Consider stab jam, do not use autopilot.

Check.

The jam stabiliser

is pushing the aircraft down towards the ground.

At 28 500 feet, the pilots switch off the autopilot

and fly the plane manually.

They have to pull back hard on the control column

to lift the nose of the plane up.

This requires considerable effort.

The plane climbs for the next seven minutes

to its cruising altitude of 32 000 feet.

As they fly up the coast, the pilots contact

Alaska maintenance department for assistance.

Maintenance, we need to know if any fault

like this got reported recently for this aircraft.

And whether there are any switches

that we might not be aware of

that could get those motors turning again.

Roger 261. I...

have verified no history on your aircraft

from the past thirty days.

Yeah, we didn't see anything in the logbook.

Why don't you move your seat forward

and I'll check this pedestal back there.

Beyond that, I don't think there's anything

we haven't checked.

I use the example... the average layman, I think, can understand.

If you try to start your car

and it doesn't crank, you try jiggling the key

in the socket and then try it again.

And I think the crew, was probably understandably,

going through a lot of these.

"Well, maybe it'll work now,

or let's try this, let's try that."

The pilots want to divert to Los Angeles,

but Alaska Airline's dispatch,

co-ordinating the movements of the company's planes,

is worried this will upset the busy schedule.

261, dispatch. Uh, if you want to land at LA,

of course, for safety reasons, we will do that.

I'll tell you though, if we land in LA,

we'll be looking at probably an hour,

an hour and a half. We got a major flow problem going right now.

Well, boy, you really put me in a spot up here.

I don't want to hear that the flow is the reason you're calling

because I'm concerned about overflying suitable airports.

Well, we wanna do what's safe,

so if that's what you feel is safe,

just wanna make sure you have all the info.

We might ask if they have

a ground school instructor available,

we could discuss it with him. And a simulator instructor.

Dispatch 261.

We're wondering if we can get some support

out of the instructors up there.

Thompson and Tansky now ask for a pilot instructor

who might know the solution to their unusual problem.

Stand by.

As they wait for a reply,

their frustration begins to show.

Just... drives me nuts, you know?

Not that I want to go on about it. But...

It just blows me away. They think we're gonna land,

they're gonna fix it, now they're worried about the flow.

Well, I'm sorry...

They're putting pressure on you.

Well, no... Yeah.

The pilots need to think about what will happen

when they descend for landing.

How will the plane behave?

Will they be able to control it?

But several minutes after requesting help from the ground,

they are getting no advice.

As Flight 261 approached Los Angeles off the coast,

the problems on board were about to get far worse.

The pilots on the crippled Air Alaska Flight 261

are flying manually at 32 000 feet

in a plane that has a jammed stabiliser

that is forcing the plane's nose down.

The pilots have another go

at freeing up the jammed stabiliser.

They switch on both the electric motors that control it.

This'll click it off.

Holy...

You got it? - Yeah! What are you doing?

It clicked off!

From 31 000 feet, Flight 261 plunges down

for over a minute, the crew battle for control.

It just got worse, okay.

We're stalled.

At first, they pull back on the control columns

to fight the dive.

But then, the pilots push the aircraft's nose down

into the dive to regain control.

It's a risky manoeuvre, pushing the plane's speed

to 350 miles an hour.

You gotta release it, ya gotta release it.

The pilots slowly bring the plane out of its dive

and back under control.

Let's get speedbrakes.

Give me high pressure pumps. - Okay.

Help me back, help me back.

Okay.

Centre Alaska, 261,

we are in a dive here.

I've lost control, vertical pitch.

Alaska 261, say again, sir.

Yeah, we're out of 26 000 feet.

We are in a vertical dive, not a dive yet,

but we've lost vertical control of our airplane.

Just help me.

Once we get the speed slowed, maybe... we'll be okay.

Maintaining level flight is difficult.

The jammed stabiliser keeps pushing the nose of the plane down.

We're at 23-7. Request...

Yeah, we got it under control here.

No, we don't.

- Okay. - Okay.

To counteract the downward force of the stabiliser,

the pilots use the elevators,

movable panels at the back of the tail

linked by cables to the control column.

The pilots pull with all their might.

The fate of the plane hangs on the strength of their arms.

In the cabin, frightened passengers try to recover

from the terrifying plunge.

They have no idea what might happen next.

Holiday memories are replaced by the fear of dying.

Dean was one of those people

who would talk to whoever was around him.

I am absolutely certain that he was talking

to the person that was sitting next to him on the plane.

I am sure that they had a connection.

Colleen was... very unique

from my other kids and she loved to travel.

She was a beautiful girl.

Here was a 25-year-old who...

It was like she had her own private rocketship.

She was really going places.

In the cockpit, the pilots struggle to control

the plane's speed so they can land.

They've got a handful of airplane,

they get her stabilised and they're now in a situation

where they make the decision properly

to go in on an emergency landing to Los Angeles International.

And they have to be able to slow the airplane up,

so you gotta experiment a little bit.

Let's take the speed brakes off.

No, leave them there. It seems to be helping.

Damn, okay, it really wants to pitch down.

Okay.

- Don't mess with that. - I agree with you.

With the plane under temporary control,

the crew make the fateful decision

to do more troubleshooting.

They need a block of clear space around the aircraft

in case they lose control again.

They contact air traffic control.

Alaska 261. Say your conditions.

261, we are at 24 000 feet,

kind of stabilised.

We're slowing down here

and we're gonna do a little troubleshooting.

Can you give me a blocked altitude

between 20 and 25?

Alaska 2-6-1, maintain block altitude,

flight level 2-0-0 through flight level 2-5-0.

The pilots know they now have clear air space

above and below the plane.

They try to figure out their next move.

You got the airplane. Let me just try it.

Okay.

How hard is it?

I don't know, my adrenaline's going.

It was really rough back there for a while.

Yeah, it is.

Whatever we did is no good, let's not do that again.

Yeah, it went to down, to full-nose down.

It's worse than it was before?

Yeah, we're in much worse shape now.

The crew know this is no mere electrical problem.

From what they've experienced,

they assume the stabiliser is now jammed.

I think it's at the stop, full stop and I'm thinking...

can it get any worse?

But it probably can.

But let's slow it, let's get down

to 200 knots and see what happens.

The crisis is getting worse.

Uncertain how the plane will react

if they try to slow it down, the pilots must still pull

on the elevators to maintain level flight.

Captain Thompson once again

tries to get help from maintenance.

Maintenance, 2-6-1, are you on?

Yeah, 2-6-1, this is maintenance.

Okay, we did both the pickle switch

and the suitcase handles and it ran away...

it ran away full-nose trim down.

Oh, it ran away trim down?

And now, we're in a damn pinch,

and we're holding. We're worse than we were before.

You're getting full-nose trim down,

but you don't get no-nose trim up, is that correct?

That's affirm.

We went to full-nose down and I'm afraid to try it again

to see if it would go in the other direction.

Okay, well, your discretion.

If you want to try it, that's okay with me.

If not, that's fine. See you at the gate.

As important as it is to have that ground contact

with people, with maintenance manuals,

and experience on the ground and the ability to call up

the manufacturer, it's not always going to give you a magic answer.

The crew had already gone through every logic tree

they possibly could think of.

Maintenance clearly do not appreciate

the gravity of the situation.

This is the last the crew will hear from them.

No one can help the pilots now,

as they struggle with the plane's faulty stabiliser.

Ever professional, however,

they try to put the passengers at ease.

Folks, we have had a flight control problem up front here.

We're working it uh...

That's Los Angeles off to the right, there,

that's where we're intending to go.

We're pretty busy up here working this situation.

I don't anticipate any big problems

once we get a couple of sub-systems on the line.

But we will be going into LAX

and I anticipate us parking there

in about 20 to 30 minutes.

In fact, they will never make it to Los Angeles.

A full-blown disaster is about to unfold.

After the terrifying 8000-feet plunge downwards,

Alaska 261 has now levelled out.

LA? Alaska 261, we're with you.

We're at 22-5, we have a jammed stabiliser

and we're maintaining altitude with difficulty.

But we can maintain altitude, we think,

and our intention is to land in Los Angeles.

The pilots request to be routed out

over the Pacific Ocean.

Centre Alaska 261.

I need to get down about 10, change my configurations,

to make sure I can control the jet

and I'd like to do that over the bay, here, if I may.

If the worst happens, they don't want to kill people

on the ground as well as in the plane.

There are a lot of lives saved

that people maybe don't realise

by the fact that this air crew said,

"Let's stay out over the water

until we've got this thing completely under control."

As they manoeuvre over the ocean,

the crew again ask air traffic control

for clear space around the plane.

Alaska 2-61, fly a heading of 2-8-0

and descend and maintain 1-7 thousand.

2-8-0 and 1-7, 17 000,

Alaska 261.

And we're generally needing a block altitude.

Alaska 2-61, roger.

I need everything picked up

and everybody strapped down

because I'm going to unload the aircraft

and see if we can regain control that way.

The pilots concentrate on trying to fix the plane.

- I'm test-flying now. - How does it feel?

It's wanting to pitch over more.

- Really? - Yeah.

Try flaps? 15-11.

Let's go to 11.

Okay. Get some power on.

- I'm at 250 knots. - Real hard?

No, actually, it's pretty stable right here.

But we got to get it down to 180.

The crew try to slow the aircraft down

to landing speed without losing control.

But every move they make could have fatal consequences.

Okay, bring the flaps and the slats back up for me.

- Slats too? - Yeah.

Treading a knife edge of control,

the pilots are still trying to free up the stabiliser.

What I wanna do is get the nose up...

And then, let the nose fall through and

see if we can stab it when it's unloaded.

The only hope for the passengers is that

the pilots' skill and experience

can get the plane to Los Angeles airport.

It's on the stop now, it's on the stop.

Not according to this, it's not.

As one effort after another fails,

the crew wonder if the stabiliser is damaged.

The trim might be...

And then it might be, uh...

If something's popped back there.

Yeah.

It might be mechanical damage too.

I think if it's controllable, we ought to just try to land it.

You think so? Okay. Let's head for LA.

But just as they prepare to land in Los Angeles,

something in the tail suddenly breaks.

- Do you feel that? - Yeah.

Okay, gimme slats. This is a bitch.

- Is it? - Yeah.

The plane dives straight down from 18 000 feet.

To avoid collisions, Los Angeles control has warned

the pilots of nearby planes that Alaska Flight 261 is in difficulty.

These pilots now report back to the tower.

That plane has just started to do a big huge plunge.

Yeah!

Yes, sir, he is definitely

in a nose-down position, descending quite rapidly.

Definitely out of control.

The plane is inverted, sir.

Okay. Yeah, he's inverted.

The pilots can barely reach the controls.

The plane is now upside down,

but they believe they might be able

to roll it out of the dive.

Mayday.

Push and roll. Push and roll.

Push, dammit. Push, push, push.

Push the blue side up!

They tried to fly the airplane, even upside down.

They never for a moment believed

that they could not find a way to control this airplane.

- Push! - I'm pushing!

Okay. Let's get rudder.

Left rudder! Left rudder!

Can't reach it!

Okay. Right rudder, right rudder!

The plane was being knocked from side to side.

It turned upside down. It was spinning.

Persons were being thrown against the walls of the plane,

falling out of their seats

and the cockpit voice recorder screaming.

Um...

Unbelievable...

horrible last few minutes of their lives.

- Are we flying? - We're flying. We're flying.

Tell them what we're doing.

- Let me just... - God damn!

We're upside down and we're flying.

And it was so violently upside down

that the pilots were hanging from their shoulder straps.

Passengers don't have shoulder straps.

Here we go.

Yeah, he just hit the water.

Yes, sir. He... He hit the water. He's down.

After a terrifying 60-second dive,

Flight 261 hit the Pacific Ocean at over 250 miles an hour.

Rescue helicopters were soon at the crash site,

but there were no survivors.

The plane had broken up on impact.

88 passengers and crew

including three young children died instantly.

Fred Miller lost his daughter Abbey and her husband Ryan.

These people suffered on the way down.

This was not a pretty way to die.

One witness who I met,

a jogger on the beach down at Port Wynamie,

he said, "You look like you lost somebody."

I said, "I did, my daughter."

He said, "You know, I saw the plane go down."

He said the plane was inverted and twisting and flipping

and then, he said it spun at times, almost like a top.

He said, "To think people...

Somebody who has a life to live

is in there dying..."

He said, "It's one of the most horrifying memories

I'll ever have."

Susan Da Silva lost her husband Dean.

I know that they went through a horrible horrible experience.

This was a violent end these people suffered.

There were no bodies that were intact or even close to intact.

And they were conscious for a long time

before it all came apart.

Colleen Werley died along with her fiancé Monty.

As a mother, you keep waiting for your... child to come home.

And Colleen had travelled so much in her life,

that it was... it was unusual

not to have her just walk in the door.

All this time, you're thinking,

something caused this, something made this happen.

And I want to find out who's responsible for this.

The investigation into Flight 261

immediately got underway.

But the wreckage lay 700 feet down.

So National Transportation Safety Board officials

called on Navy submersibles to retrieve the debris

from the sea bed.

We set up a base of operations

and we had a remote operating vehicle

with the side-scanning sonar which they used

to map the debris field an get an idea of how widely spread the wreckage was.

At the National Transportation Safety Board headquarters

in Washington, the investigators'

immediate concern was to find out

what had brought the plane down.

The first clues came from the cockpit voice recordings.

LA? Alaska 261, we're with you.

We're at 22-5, we have a jammed stabiliser

and we're maintaining altitude with difficulty.

We immediately suspected some problem

in the tail of the airplane which is where the controls are.

Something was wrong back there

and that was the key piece of wreckage to look for.

The MD-83 that crashed was a revised version

of the Douglas Corporation's popular DC-9.

Over 2000 of which were delivered to airlines worldwide.

The engines were at the rear and the distinctive

T-shaped tail was an essential element of the design.

In a big turbo jet aircraft,

one of the brilliant elements of the design

is that since you're going to be loading passengers and cargo,

you want to be able to have that aircraft a little nose-heavy

or a little tail-heavy. Well, in order to do that,

you actually had to have that entire stabiliser moving.

But the ones that are the most difficult to engineer

are the T-tailed airplanes where you have the vertical stabiliser

and the horizontal sitting on top.

And we call that stabiliser "trim"

and that is an essential element

of what makes these aircrafts so usable.

In the MD-83, a motorised jackscrew

in the tail moves the horizontal stabiliser up and down.

As the stabiliser moves up,

the nose of the plane moves down.

As the stabiliser moves down, the nose moves up.

But what role had the two-foot jackscrew

played in the loss of Flight 261?

The investigators were anxious to inspect it

as soon as it was recovered from the sea bed.

The jackscrew wasn't mated

with the nut that it screws into.

It was just by itself.

And the nut was found in another piece of structure

a few feet away from where the jackscrew was.

To have a screw separate itself from a nut

with very thick threads surprised us.

Secondly, we noticed that there was a curled piece of brass

around the jackscrew. And all of the threads...

that you can see here, these ridges were gone,

they had been stripped out.

And the remnants of those were found coiled on the jackscrew.

Once the thread had been stripped off the nut,

the jackscrew could no longer turn.

The pilots could not have known the real nature of the problem.

The crew was confronted with a situation

that had never occurred before.

There is no failed jackscrew procedure

in the quick reference handbooks that they have available.

There's no training for it.

When the jackscrew jammed,

the crew were unable to adjust the stabiliser.

We felt that it was due to the fact

that these nut threads had worn away

and it was just too hard for that jackscrew

under the power of the electric motor to turn.

That gave the flight crew an indication

that there was a problem.

The crew knew they had a problem in the tail plane.

But they had no idea what.

Two motors controlled the jackscrew.

They tried each in turn.

But the pilots attempts to free the jammed stabiliser

inadvertently made their situation worse.

We're at 23-7... request...

Yeah, we've got it under control here.

No, we don't.

Where they went wrong was that

they wanted to try both the alternate

and the primary trim motors at the same time.

When the pilots switched both the electric motors on,

the jackscrew moved, but the threads had given way

and the jackscrew was now held only by a single retaining nut.

From here on, the plane was doomed.

That end nut was never designed

to hold the loads generated aerodynamically by the airplane.

Let's get speed brakes.

Give me high-pressure pumps. - Okay.

Now we know, in the glaring light of hindsight,

now when we turn the situation around in time

and look back, we can see that this air crew,

and no air crew should have ever been fooling with the trim

and trying to run it back and forth.

The retaining nut grew weaker and weaker.

Then, finally, through the loads

beating down on that nut, the nut finally failed.

- Feel that? - Yeah.

Okay, give me slats.

The jackscrew slipped

completely out of the acme nut

allowing the horizontal stabiliser

to move well beyond its aerodynamic limits.

This is a bitch.

- Is it? - Yeah.

The stabiliser forced the plane down.

And now, completely out of control,

it rolled over into its final dive.

Okay, let's get rudder.

Left rudder, left rudder!

I can't reach it.

This crew was working to recover the aircraft

right down to the water.

I mean, they did not give up

the whole way down through the descent.

Here we go.

It was clear to the investigators

that the failure of the jackscrew

was the only explanation

for the plane's erratic flight path and final dive.

But why had this happened?

Why had the jackscrew failed?

The investigators began looking deeper and deeper

into the condition of the faulty jackscrew

on Flight 261.

What had caused it to fail?

There was no lubrication or visible grease

on the working area of the screw.

That was surprising and strange.

The discovery of no grease on the jackscrew

alarmed the investigators.

They alerted the Federal Aviation Administration

who ordered an immediate check on all the MD-80s in the USA.

This led to a shocking discovery.

At Alaska Airlines, in six of its fleet of 34 planes,

the jackscrew assembly needed to be replaced

after failing new inspections.

No grease is the culprit.

No grease or inadequate grease

is the only thing that can give you that wear rate.

A simple lack of grease led to the failure of the jackscrew

and the loss of 88 lives.

But why did this happen at Alaska Airlines?

The investigators' attention now switched to the company's maintenance program.

What emerged was deeply worrying.

We interviewed all the mechanics

who had worked on these airplanes.

We knew that they had been falsifying records

or not doing the work they had indicated.

The mechanics at Alaska complained that they were

pressured to keep the planes in the air

or that their recommendations were overruled by supervisors.

Some alleged that records were altered

to show work done that was not done.

Alaska has long been one of America's most successful

airlines, but in the early 1990s,

the economic downturn hit the company hard.

Its response was to slash costs to revive its fortunes.

Pilots, maintenance workers,

management and others had to make sacrifices.

Jobs were lost, pay was cut

and every hour aircraft spent on the ground was seen as waste.

Two years of aggressive axe wielding

saw costs come down by 80 million dollars.

Profits leaped. It was a corporate triumph.

In Alaska's case, in the early nineties,

this airline had to do an incredible job

of reforming itself from a fairly high-cost carrier

to a lower-cost carrier that could compete head on

with South West Airlines and with others.

And they did it. They did it brilliantly.

Nobody really believed that it could happen.

Alaska Airlines began flying the planes more intensively.

It doubled the average daily use of its fleet.

But keeping the planes in the air earning money

put maintenance schedules under pressure.

John Leyatine was former lead mechanic

at Alaska Airline's Oakland maintenance facility

where he worked for over eight years.

Leyatine felt that the new pressures on maintenance

put passengers' lives at risk.

He was to pay dearly for expressing those concerns.

We have used an actor to portray his experiences

based on his sworn evidence to the NTSB.

Leyatine claimed that planes

were pushed back into service too quickly.

Sometimes, rather than wait for a replacement part or repair,

supervisors passed planes fit for service...

free to carry passengers up into the air.

In October 1998, over 15 months before the crash,

John Leyatine became so worried that he did something

that would change his life forever.

He reported Alaska Airlines to the US Department

of Transportation, alleging violations in maintenance procedures.

There were very few voices at Alaska who had concerns

about the maintenance and there should have been more

and there should have been people listening.

John Leyatine is a hero in my book.

In December 1999, over a year before the crash,

the FAA and Department of Transportation officials

moved on Alaska Airlines.

The case was referred to Federal prosecutors

and the FBI raided Alaska's maintenance facilities

and seized thousands of records.

The raid was the opening shot

in a Federal Grand Jury investigation,

that would last three years.

No criminal charges were brought against the airline.

Alaska officials denied that any unsafe planes

were put into service or that passengers' lives were ever at risk.

But the investigation revealed hundreds of violations of Federal regulations.

Alaska Airlines was fined.

The FAA insisted on changes to the company's maintenance

and safety procedures.

The FAA also suspended two supervisors

for falsifying records.

Like other whistleblowers, John Leyatine would pay heavily

for his efforts to save lives.

Alaska put him on paid leave from his job,

losing him thousands of dollars in regular overtime earnings.

Then in January 2000,

John Leyatine saw his worst nightmare come true.

The kind of accident he had tried to prevent

now took place just off the California Coast.

After the loss of Flight 261,

Leyatine went back to his private work records.

Incredibly, he found he had a direct link

to the crashed airliner.

Two years before at the plane's last overhaul,

he had ordered that the jackscrew

on this particular very aircraft be replaced.

He then went off-shift.

When investigators examined the record,

they found that Leyatine's recommendation

had been overruled by the next shift

and the plane put back into service.

It would be two years before the next overhaul,

but time ran out.

Four months before the overhaul was due, Flight 261 crashed.

Alaska Airlines labelled Leyatine a disruptive influence.

He sued the company for libel.

Alaska settled, but Leyatine could no longer work

in the industry he loved.

I get calls almost every week,

somebody saying, "Should I blow the whistle?"

And I always tell them, "You need to know...

you need to be prepared to find another line of work

because you will not work in the industry

and you will not work in the government."

In most cases, it's almost impossible

to be a whistleblower and survive your career.

As the investigators continued their work into Flight 261,

they made another disturbing discovery about the drive

to cut costs at Alaska Airlines.

To keep planes flying more intensively,

Alaska had dramatically extended the intervals between service.

This was significant because when a plane is designed,

every part has a schedule listing when it is serviced

and when it must be replaced.

You're supposed to go in and inspect every so many hours

and that's different on parts all over the plane.

Some things you have to look at after every flight,

other things have to be inspected

every two or three days.

In 1996, Alaska Airlines extended the intervals

between MD-80 jackscrew inspections by 400%.

Before 1996, jackscrews were inspected

every 600 flight hours.

Now, there was over two and a half thousand hours

between each service.

If you had 600 hours between inspection points

and greasing points, we have no chance

of ever having a metal to metal contact situation,

but if you put that up to 2 000 hours or 2 500 hours,

now what you do is eat into some of these protective stages,

these barriers that we have towards catastrophic failure.

In its final report into the crash of Flight 261,

the NTSB concluded that the extended service intervals

for the jackscrews on its MD-80s

was a significant contributor to the crash.

With carriers doing anything to save a dime,

maintenance, safety took a back seat.

And one of the shocking things about Alaska

is that they were allowed to increase inspection intervals.

And it's very shocking

because that is the only way we have safety.

The extended maintenance intervals meant that

the lack of grease on the jackscrew went undiscovered.

But now, investigators wondered if the failure of the jackscrew

assembly revealed a basic flaw in the plane's design.

They found that the MD-80 broke one of the fundamental rules of aircraft design:

It was not fail-safe.

The design philosophy that has made aviation so safe

is that we should never ever have a situation

in which one catastrophic failure of some component

in the airplane causes us to lose the airplane.

These backups to the backup, backing up the backups,

is why we can get on an airplane with almost 100% assurance

that we're gonna get where we want to go safely.

There was no backup to the jackscrew and its nut.

Engineers never envisioned a situation on the MD-80

where the jackscrew might fail.

With inspections every 600 flight hours

and replacements every 2 000 hours,

the designers did not add an additional redundant backup system.

It was utterly laughable that they said

it was a redundant system. There is one screw and one nut.

That's all there is. It's not redundant.

The MD-80 continues to fly worldwide.

Despite the revelation of this dangerous design flaw,

the jackscrew assembly has not been redesigned.

Inspection intervals have been shortened,

but airlines still rely on proper maintenance

to prevent the same accident happening again.

In its final report, the National Transportation Safety Board concluded

that the crash of Flight 261 was due to the lack of adequate

greasing and the stretched service intervals.

When coupled with the design of the jackscrew,

these failures led to a completely avoidable accident

and the loss of 88 lives.

Three years after the crash of Flight 261,

the relatives and friends of the dead

dedicated a permanent memorial

at Port Wynamie, close to the crash site.

I think the best thing and the only thing

in our infinite inadequacy of making up for the loss

from this life is to say something that we've been able

to say in a lot of other accidents

to other grieving families, and that is,

"Those deaths will not be in vain.

We will not let them be in vain."

Every one of those lives will be made to count

in terms of making sure that three, four, five

or ten other people do not die.

Colleen was different,

she was adventurous and there's nobody like that in our family.

And I don't know...

what we can do except to remember Colleen

and to live our lives now a little bit better for her.

You know, when I was growing up,

we didn't wear seatbelts.

There weren't even seatbelts in cars.

And now, we know that we need to wear our seatbelts.

We didn't know that much about smoking cigarettes,

and now, we know that we can't smoke cigarettes.

Well, there's a lot to learn about airline safety too.

None of us are the same anymore.

It's like walking into a giant storm...

wave after wave, forming up coming in,

because it never stops.

Grief over the loss of a child

is not something I wish on anybody.

This plane went down because of neglect.

It seems like such an unholy type of loss.

What a hard way to die,

so an airline can, you know, make more money.

difuze