On January 31, 2000, Alaska Airlines Flight 261 crashed into the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of California, killing all 88 people on board. The aircraft was a McDonnell Douglas MD-83 traveling from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, to Seattle with a scheduled stop in San Francisco. Before the fatal impact, Captain Ted Thompson and First Officer William Tansky spent more than half an hour trying to control the aircraft, which had suffered a critical failure in the horizontal stabilizer.
The pilots realized the problem during flight and requested to divert to Los Angeles, where they intended to make an emergency landing. At 4:08 PM, the situation was already beyond control. The investigation revealed that the disaster did not originate from that specific flight, but rather from maintenance problems that had been building for years, related to a mechanism called the adjustment screw, responsible for aiding in controlling the aircraft's pitch.
When the component failed, the pilots progressively lost control of the airplane. The moment the horizontal stabilizer gave way was captured in a famous phrase from Captain Thompson: "Ah, here we go," expressing the desperate attempt to regain control before the crash into the Pacific.
