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The Day a Worn Jackscrew Turned Seattle Flight 261 Deadly

The Day a Worn Jackscrew Turned Seattle Flight 261 Deadly

A terrifying mechanical drift turned ordinary travel into disaster: the jackscrew that controlled Alaska Airlines Flight 261's horizontal stabilizer had been wearing at twelve times the expected rate for years, and a warning three years earlier had been overruled. Ninety seconds after the pilot asked for a few minutes to check control, the plane was upside down at seventeen thousand feet-how many times could this failure have been prevented?

In this episode, we follow the final flight and the lead-up in factual detail, outlining the…

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