American Airlines Flight 1683
McDonnell Douglas DC-9-82 · Incident: fire en route
From DCA · WASHINGTON DC, VA to Dallas Fort Worth International Airport (DFW)
Event
- NTSB case
- IAD01IA017
- 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-9-82
- 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
- N3507A
- Operator
- American Airlines
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From DCA · WASHINGTON DC, VATo Dallas Fort Worth International Airport (DFW), DALLAS/FT WORTH, TX
- 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 · climb to 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
- Fire
- 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
- Company/operator management › Maintenance, modification, improper
- Company/operator management › Procedure inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
During initial climb-out, the airplane was struck by lightning. Shortly thereafter, dark smoke entered the forward area of the passenger cabin. The crew declared an emergency and the flight attendants, with a passenger's assistance, cut a hole in the overhead panel, and discharged the contents of two hand held fire extinguishers. The airplane landed uneventfully and an emergency evacuation was conducted without incident. Examination of the airplane revealed that a deactivated navigational antenna located in the tail cone had been struck by lightning. Attached to the antenna were two coaxial cables, which were tie-wrapped together, fed into the cabin, and attached along the upper left hand side of the fuselage between the insulation blankets and overhead panels. The cable ends were observed to be mechanically cut and had been fastened above row 7AB, in the area of the most fire damage. The insulation to the right of the cable ends was cratered and burrowed. The cable ends were not protected or grounded. The cables had been cut and partially removed in accordance with an engineering change order (ECO) developed by the operator, so a more advanced system could be installed. According to the procedure, the cable ends were to be covered with heat shrink tubing or other suitable material. Fifty-seven of the operator's 259 MD-80 airplanes had undergone the partial removal of the cables, and 21 airplanes still had the full Omega antenna system installed. As a result of this incident, the operator implemented a revised engineering change order (ECO) that stated, 'the cable which runs down the vertical stabilizer is cut and grounded to structure in the aft accessory compartment. A portion of the cable, which runs through the aft pressure bulkhead, is removed and the feed through is sealed. The intent of this action is to protect the cable from lightning damage.' As of January 11, 2001, the revised ECO had been implemented on all 78 airplanes.
Probable cause
the operator's inadequate maintenance procedure to disconnect the Omega navigational system, which resulted in coaxial cables being cut and not properly protected. A factor in the incident was the lightning strike.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record IAD01IA017
- Event ID
- 20001215X45420
- Case number
- IAD01IA017
- 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: 87e95109d5db47301f79f35c35a7b084cf08ed88768b97b5ac1469ca10b173f6; retrieved 2026-09-18T16:19:44.310Z.
- The NTSB's operator name is blank for N3507A; the operator shown is the name the NTSB records it doing business as.