Northwest Airlines Flight 1714
Airbus Industrie A320-211 · Incident: airframe, component or system failure en route
From Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport (DTW) to Fort Lauderdale Hollywood International Airport (FLL)
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI96IA109
- Event typeAccident: someone killed or seriously injured, or the aircraft substantially damaged (NTSB definition). Incident: an occurrence that affected or could have affected safety, short of that. Glossary
- Incident
- InvestigationHow far the investigation had got when the record was published: preliminary, ongoing, final or completed. Unknown where the source does not say. Glossary
- Completed
- API-reported fatalities
- 0 · all aircraft and ground
- Ground fatalities
- 0
- OperationWhat kind of flying it was, grouped by the rules it flew under: airline (US Part 121), air taxi and commuter (Part 135), general aviation (Part 91 and similar), military or government. Glossary
- Airline
- WeatherVisual meteorological conditions (VMC): good enough to fly by looking outside. Instrument conditions (IMC): cloud or low visibility, flying by instruments. Glossary
- Visual Meteorological Cond
Airbus Industrie A320-211
- Aircraft type
- Airbus A320
- Category
- Airplane
- RegistrationThe aircraft's tail number, such as N12345 or G-ABCD. Registrations are reissued, so the same one years apart can be a different aircraft. Glossary
- N340NW
- Operator
- Northwest Airlines
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport (DTW), MITo Fort Lauderdale Hollywood International Airport (FLL), Fort Lauderdale, FL
- Aircraft age
- Not recorded
- Flight rulesThe regulations the flight operated under: in the US, Part 91 (general aviation), Part 121 (airlines), Part 135 (air taxi and commuter) and others; for flights abroad, the NTSB's coarser commercial or non-commercial code. Glossary
- Part 121: Air Carrier
- Phase of flightThe stage of the flight when things started to go wrong: standing, taxi, takeoff, initial climb, en route, maneuvering, approach or landing. Glossary
- En route · climb to cruise
- First occurrenceThe single coded event the NTSB judges best describes what happened (records from 2008 on). Older records name the first occurrence in the sequence instead. Glossary
- Airframe, component or system failure
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- None
Cause areas
- Flt control syst, fly-by-wire › Failure, partial
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The captain reported that the crew leveled at flight level 370 and received an elevator aileron computer (ELAC) number two pitch fault message. The message cleared itself. A few minutes later they received servo fault message. The 'pitch jumped +/- 100 feet.' The crew descended to flight level 350. During the level off they received an ELAC number one pitch fault message. The crew declared an emergency and landed uneventfully. The aircraft maintenance log revealed a similar occurrence on the previous flight. Investigation revealed an intermittent fault in the elevator servo controller electrovalve coil and a defective diode in the electronic module for one of the stabilizer actuators. The defective diode produced an intermittent loss of electrical motor power during transient, closed loop control of the actuator.
Probable cause
a defective diode in the number two stabilizer actuator that produced an intermittent loss of electrical motor power during transient, closed loop control of the actuator. A factor was the intermittent open circuit in the elevator servo controller electrovalve coil.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI96IA109
- Event ID
- 20001208X05372
- Case number
- CHI96IA109
- Dataset
- historical-pre2008
- Source SHA-256
- 89e2df6d848e7ab3b42e7d7c7a03ff403303057a26ca04c95b3ea67201c3ce74
Source notes (5)
- Unreviewed is an editorial label, not an investigation status. API-sourced is not report-checked or human-reviewed. Explicit event totals are used without summing aircraft injury tables; onboard allocation is withheld. Unknown values remain unknown. The operation category is mapped from the NTSB-reported FAR part and has not been reviewed.
- Filled from the NTSB case API where the bulk record had no value: investigation status, damage. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date, which is the same as the UTC date the NTSB stores.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 684baa25c2dd94308379667d3327655fe8dae360e05a7b2fa395d1a6555c6af7; retrieved 2026-09-18T17:52:46.014Z.
- The NTSB's operator name is blank for N340NW; the operator shown is the name the NTSB's other records give its FAA operator code, NWAA.