US Airways Flight 2686
Boeing 737-200 · Accident: in flight encounter with weather en route
From Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport (BWI) to Jacksonville International Airport (JAX)
Event
- NTSB case
- ATL01LA049
- 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
- Unknown
- 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
Boeing 737-200
- Aircraft type
- Boeing 737
- 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
- N253US
- Operator
- U.S. Airways
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport (BWI), Baltimore, MDTo Jacksonville International Airport (JAX), Jacksonville, FL
- 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
- 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
- Dispatcher › Preflight briefing service, inadequate
- Weather condition › Turbulence
Approximate · Estimated position: the centre of Jacksonville, FL, the place the record names. Not the accident site.
NTSB narrative
Approximately 12-15 minutes after takeoff during climb, flight 2686 experienced moderate turbulence. The seat belt sign was illuminated at the time. One of the flight attendants was thrown to the floor and received serious injuries during the encounter. According to the pilot, the flight crew was not informed of the 0736 pilot report of turbulence in the vicinity of the accident.
Probable cause
The flight dispatcher failure to provide the flight crew with current in-flight turbulence information that resulted in the in-flight encounter with turbulence during climb. A factor was the pilots failure to obtain adequate weather information.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ATL01LA049
- Event ID
- 20010503X00872
- Case number
- ATL01LA049
- 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: 663676609299e57c01ca2a410e39a5573a1f64f19eaa37792232933012c32261; retrieved 2026-09-18T16:15:02.942Z.
- The NTSB's operator name is blank for N253US; the operator shown is the name the NTSB records it doing business as.