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Harrowing cockpit audio revealed the moment an Alaska Airlines plane plummeted in the Pacific Ocean.
On January 31, 2000, Alaska Airlines Flight 261 was scheduled to travel from Licenciado Gustavo Díaz Ordaz International Airport in Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, Mexico, to Seattle–Tacoma International Airport in Washington.
While the aircraft successfully left Mexico, it never made it to its final destination after the plane started to experience technical difficulties during the flight.
Ultimately, the plane ended up crashing into the Pacific Ocean, killing all 88 people, including 83 passengers, three cabin crew and two pilots, onboard.
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25 years on from the tragic ordeal and it is still one of the worst aviation disasters in modern US history.
With this in mind, the heartbreaking incident is still being talked about to this day and cockpit audio has recently resurfaced on social media.
The flight in question was being manned by Captain Ted Thompson, 53, and 57-year-old First Officer Bill Tansky, both of whom had flown a collective 12,000 hours in McDonnell Douglas MD-80s aircrafts, AeroTime reported.
But their vast amount of experience couldn't save them as it was later revealed that part of the plane's tail assembly failed due to a lack of lubrication of the jackscrew assembly.
In the resurfaced audio, Captain Thompson was heard telling air traffic control that they were 'in a dive'.
He went on to explain: "Not a dive yet but we've lost vertical control of our airplane."
Thompson then said they'd managed to get it under control, but First Officer Tanksy weighed in and said 'no we don't'.
Tanksy and Thompson proceeded to do some troubleshooting of the aircraft to try fix the issue.
The pair went quiet for a while an air traffic control officer chatted to another pilot in the air, believed to have been flying an Aero Commander 690A at the time, and requested to 'keep an eye on [the Alaska Airlines flight]'.
It was this pilot who then informed air traffic control that the Alaska Airlines jet 'just started to do a big, huge plunge'.
Chilling cockpit voice recordings from Alaska Airlines Flight 261, which nosedived into the ocean, tragically claiming all 88 lives on board (2000) pic.twitter.com/vqZ1h7Th5l
— Historic Vids (@historyinmemes) May 18, 2025
A second pilot confirmed what the other said and explained that Flight 261 was 'definitely in a nose down position'.
Shortly after, the two planes that were watching the Alaska Airlines plane nosedive said that it had hit the water. The airplane was destroyed on impact.
The Federal Aviation Agency went on to investigate the crash.
In a statement, it said: "The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) determined that the probable cause of this accident was a loss of airplane pitch control resulting from the in-flight failure of the horizontal stabilizer trim system jackscrew assembly's Acme nut threads.
"The thread failure was caused by excessive wear resulting from Alaska Airline's insufficient lubrication of the jackscrew assembly."
