US Airways Express Flight 3678
Boeing - Canada (de Havilland) DHC-8-102 · Incident: airframe, component or system failure while standing
From LaGuardia Airport (LGA) to Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport (BWI)
Event
- NTSB case
- IAD00IA026
- 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
Boeing - Canada (de Havilland) DHC-8-102
- Aircraft type
- Boeing Canada (de Havilland) DHC-8
- 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
- N838EX
- Operator
- US Airways Express
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From LaGuardia Airport (LGA), NEW YORK, NYTo Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport (BWI)
- 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
- Standing · engine(s) operating
- 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
- Flight control surfaces/attachments › Missing
- Flight control, elevator › Bent
Approximate · Estimated position: the centre of Baltimore, MD, the place the record names. Not the accident site.
NTSB narrative
During the flight, the airplane required full nose-down trim and forward pressure on the yoke to maintain level flight. As a result, a logbook entry was made, and inspection of the airplane revealed damage due to contact between the elevator and rudder. Examination of the elevator gust lock mechanism revealed that only three of four elevator stop bumpers were installed. The upper right bumper was missing, but the mount bolt was still in place. The upper left bumper was cracked, chipped, crazed, and displayed a longitudinal crack that ran its entire length. FDR data showed that when the airplane taxied onto the departure runway for the previous flight, the gust lock was released, and rapid deflection of the elevator control surfaces and the control yoke was noted. At the point where the control yoke returned to its nominal position, the LH and RH elevator graph lines were approximately 4 degrees apart. These lines remained separated by approximately 4 degrees throughout the remainder of the flight. Examination of prior flights revealed the elevator control surface graph lines were superimposed in all modes of flight. Winds at the departure airport were from 300 degrees at 22 knots, gusting to 27 knots. A product safety representative for the airplane manufacturer 'guaranteed' the airplane would have been undamaged during the rapid elevator deflection, had the elevator stop bumpers been installed.
Probable cause
the missing elevator stop bumper that resulted in elevator over-travel and damage to the elevator. A factor in the incident was the abrupt release of the elevator control lock in windy conditions.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record IAD00IA026
- Event ID
- 20001212X20648
- Case number
- IAD00IA026
- 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: a568d250a99630e9cfebe6fbc1796b62501f92c713f34280015a1bb87529aee5; retrieved 2026-09-18T16:46:00.144Z.
- The NTSB's operator name is blank for N838EX; the operator shown is the name the NTSB records it doing business as.