 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 <unk> assembly for the horizontal stabilizer 's trim system . The failure of the acme nut threads happened because of insufficient lubrication of the <unk> 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 . 
