 Flight 261 , an McDonnell Douglas MD @-@ 83 , plunged into the Pacific Ocean near Point Mugu , California while preparing to attempt an emergency landing at Los Angeles International Airport en route from Puerto Vallarta , Mexico , to San Francisco and Seattle , killing all 88 people on board . In its final report , the National Transportation Safety Board ( NTSB ) determined the cause of the accident to be failure of acme nut threads which were part of the jackscrew assembly for the horizontal stabilizer 's trim system . The failure of the acme nut threads happened because of insufficient lubrication of the jackscrew assembly which was the result of Alaska 's extended lubrication and inspection intervals and from the Federal Aviation Administration 's ( FAA ) approval of those intervals . NTSB also found that the lack of a fail @-@ safe mechanism for the failure of the acme nut threads on the MD @-@ 80 design contributed to the accident . This incident , along with an earlier ValuJet Flight 592 crash , led to closer FAA oversight of airline maintenance operations . The accident was also the subject of episode 6 , season 1 , of the documentary series , Mayday . 
