Flight 1749 · Boeing 727-232
Boeing 727-232 · Accident: on ground/water collision with object during pushback
From LaGuardia Airport (LGA) to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA)
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC00LA040
- 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
- Visual Meteorological Cond
Boeing 727-232
- Aircraft type
- Boeing 727
- 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
- N521DA
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From LaGuardia Airport (LGA)To Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA), Washington, DC
- 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
- Pushback/towing
- 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
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Company maintenance personnel › Condition(s)/step(s) insufficiently defined
- Company maintenance personnel › Supervision, inadequate
- Miscellaneous eqpt/furnishings › Failure
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The B727 was dispatched with the APU inoperative. The captain elected to start all engines prior to pushback due to a short taxi. After pushback, and during a forward tow, a shear pin on the tow bar failed, and the airplane rolled into a tug. Examination of the tow bar revealed looseness in the head, and worn holes for the shear pins. Metallurgical examination of the shear pins found pre-existing cracking and the pins were softer than specified. The pushback operation was conducted by contract personnel. The failed tow bar had been inspected daily by contract personnel with no problems noted and it continued in use. A fleet wide campaign found 63 percent of the tow bars in need of maintenance. The investigation revealed the airline did not have a preventative maintenance program for their tow bars, or a program to train the contract personnel in inspections of the tow bars, and to monitor their inspections.
Probable cause
was the use of a defective tow bar, due to the lack of an adequate inspection by contract personnel, the airlines lack of an adequate preventative maintenance program for the tow bars, and the lack of oversight by the airline on the contract personnel who inspected the tow bar. A factor was the softer than specified shear pins used in the tow bar.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC00LA040
- Event ID
- 20001212X20164
- Case number
- NYC00LA040
- 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: cb809c212550e82e1c002eab8c3ddd9642888501e2ed5508f81fda7ffe2e71c9; retrieved 2026-09-18T16:50:59.763Z.