Southwest Airlines Flight 436
Boeing 737-200 · Accident: on ground/water collision with object during takeoff
From Nashville International Airport (BNA) to Chicago Midway International Airport (MDW)
Event
- NTSB case
- ATL96FA101
- 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
- Accident
- 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
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
Boeing 737-200
- Aircraft type
- Boeing 737
- 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
- N53SW
- Operator
- Southwest Airlines
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Nashville International Airport (BNA)To Chicago Midway International Airport (MDW), Chicago, IL
- 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
- Takeoff · roll/run
- 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
- On ground/water collision with object
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Minor
Cause areas
- Flight attendant › Evacuation, initiated
- Flight attendant › Improper use of procedure
- Pilot in command › Abort above v1, performed
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
During the takeoff roll, after V1 was called by the first officer, a bird was ingested in the left engine, resulting in a compressor stall. The captain (capt) initiated a rejected takeoff as VR was called. The airplane continued accelerating momentarily, & V1 was exceeded by 10 kts, resulting in an overrun of the runway. After stopping on the overrun, the capt made a PA announcement for the passengers to remain seated. Fire/rescue personnel arrived, confirmed there was no fire, & noted the tires were deflating & smoking (due to excessive brake temperature from the rejected takeoff which melted the fuse plugs & deflated the tires). Evacuation slides were dearmed, & the cabin doors were opened for ventilation. Fire erupted from the right brake & was immediately extinguished by fire personnel. Hearing a fireman shout 'fire,' the flight attendants (FAs) at the forward & aft entry doors commanded an evacuation without informing the capt that a fire had been reported, without communicating 1st with each other, & without determining the location of the fire. To evacuate, they closed the cabin doors, rearmed the slides, & began the evacuation. During evacuation, 1 passenger was seriously injured; 4 received minor injuries. The airline company did not provided 'joint' Crew Resource Management (CRM) training to flight deck crews & FAs. Two of 3 FAs said they had not received company CRM training.
Probable cause
the captain's improper rejected takeoff, in that the takeoff was rejected after V1, and the flight attendants' improper use of the evacuation procedure, in that an evacuation was independently initiated without the captain's approval, and without assessing the condition and location of the fire. Factors related to the accident were: bird ingestion in the left engine near lift-off speed during the takeoff roll, and company's inadequate Crew Resource Management (CRM) training for flight attendants.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ATL96FA101
- Event ID
- 20001208X06148
- Case number
- ATL96FA101
- 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. 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: c723c97ab7bc95c4bec68c438c11e223e766e1197d36138aaf159106d4a14a83; retrieved 2026-09-18T17:48:55.095Z.
- The NTSB's operator name is blank for N53SW; the operator shown is the name the NTSB's other records give its FAA operator code, SWAA.