Delta Connection Flight CAA4276
Aerospatiale ATR-72-212 · Accident: in flight encounter with weather en route
From Hartsfield Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL) to Asheville Regional Airport (AVL)
Event
- NTSB case
- MIA01LA030
- 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
Aerospatiale ATR-72-212
- Aircraft type
- Aerospatiale ATR-72
- 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
- N630AS
- Operator
- Delta Connection
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Hartsfield Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL), Atlanta, GATo Asheville Regional Airport (AVL)
- 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 · descent
- 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
- In flight encounter with weather
- 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
- Weather condition › Mountain wave
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
At 10,000 feet msl, while maneuvering for landing, the flight encountered an area of moderate turbulence. The seat belt sign was 'ON' and the flight attendants were performing pre-landing duties. One of the flight attendants broke a bone during the turbulence event. The captain was not informed about the injured flight attendant until he walked to the back of the aircraft after arriving at the gate. According to the injured flight attendant (F/A-A), she was briefed '...only [that it]...would be a little rough getting out of Atlanta, but once we got up everything would be ok...no warning from the cockpit at all of rough air/turbulence' Both flight attendants were knocked to the floor to a sitting position, and both said the turbulence didn't stop. The injured flight attendant said, 'I...was knocked to the floor over and over...up into the service door and the passenger door; my head hit the steps and ended up on the floor flat down...I stayed on the floor...no bells were given when the aircraft was descending...the only 4 bells I heard was at landing time. Also no announcements from [the] cockpit was made when descending through 10,000 feet to the passengers because we were in 0.75 moderate turbulence at the time.' SIGMET [significant metrological] November 2, and AIRMET (Airmen Meteorological Information Network) Tango update 3, calling for a large area of moderate turbulence below 12,000 feet, were current and applicable to the flight's descent into Ashville. The company verified that both the SIGMET and AIRMET were part of the captain's weather briefing, and he had them both in his possession before departure.
Probable cause
the flight encountered forecasted turbulence, which resulted in serious injury to a flight attendant. Factors in this accident were; the captain's inadequate briefing to the cabin crew; and the insufficient information about the known turbulence that would be encountered during descent.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record MIA01LA030
- Event ID
- 20001212X22320
- Case number
- MIA01LA030
- 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: b3ee7b3d215d6d4183ae7a7197e049809915f448f786f4445af8357b05641d32; retrieved 2026-09-18T16:20:20.454Z.
- The NTSB's operator name is blank for N630AS; the operator shown is the name the NTSB records it doing business as.