Northwest Airlines Flight 1446
McDonnell Douglas DC-9-30 · Incident: airframe, component or system failure en route
From General Mitchell International Airport (MKE) to Bishop International Airport (FNT)
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI97IA195
- 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
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
McDonnell Douglas DC-9-30
- Aircraft type
- McDonnell Douglas DC-9
- 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
- N963N
- Operator
- Northwest Airlines
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From General Mitchell International Airport (MKE), Milwaukee, WITo Bishop International Airport (FNT)
- 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 · 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
- Minor
Cause areas
- Electrical system, circuit breaker › Failure, total
- Exterior light(s) › Shorted
Approximate · Estimated position: the centre of Flint, MI, the place the record names. Not the accident site.
NTSB narrative
The captain and first officer noticed smoke coming from underneath the airplane's instrument panel glareshield while at cruise altitude. After putting on smoke goggles and oxygen masks the flight crew performed the emergency checklist. Upon shutting down the generators, the smoke cleared from the cockpit in about 4-minutes. The flight landed and its passengers deplaned without incident. Examination of the instrument panel area revealed burnt wiring and a charred position light switch. Further examination showed that the left wingtip's oscillating position light autotransformer had shorted out, and the position light circuit breaker was stuck in the closed position.
Probable cause
An electrical short in the wiring of the left wingtip oscillating position light auto transformer and a failure of the system circuit breaker.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI97IA195
- Event ID
- 20001208X08311
- Case number
- CHI97IA195
- Dataset
- historical-pre2008
- Source SHA-256
- 89e2df6d848e7ab3b42e7d7c7a03ff403303057a26ca04c95b3ea67201c3ce74
Source notes (4)
- 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: 3e8bceec3bdb5ead1ff0e930c5572d1ee35834c7bd49d4f304682a996e32852b; retrieved 2026-09-18T17:29:42.955Z.