Western Airlines Boeing 727 incident
Boeing 727 · Incident: in flight encounter with weather en route
From MINNAPOLIS, MN to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA)
Event
- NTSB case
- DCA82IA031
- 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 727
- 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
- N288WA
- Operator
- Western Airlines
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From MINNAPOLIS, MNTo 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
- 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
- Flight attendant › Interpretation of instructions, conflicting
- Weather condition › Turbulence
Approximate · Estimated position: the centre of Washington, DC, the place the record names. Not the accident site.
NTSB narrative
THE ANNOUNCEMENT OF THE POSSIBILITY OF TURBULENCE DURING THE DESCENT AND APPROACH WAS MADE. DURING THE LULLS IN THE TURBULENCE THE CABIN ATTENDANTS WERE ATTENDING THEIR DUTIES AND WERE HURT WHEN INTERMITTENT JOLTS OF ROUGH AIR WERE ENCOUNTERED WHILE TWO OF ATTENDANTS WERE NOT BUCKLED IN THEIR SEATS. THE LANDING AT DCA WAS COMPLETED WITHOUT FURTHER INCIDENT.
Verbatim NTSB analysis from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DCA82IA031
- Event ID
- 20020917X04491
- Case number
- DCA82IA031
- 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: local date, investigation status, damage. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 1982-09-03.
- API snapshot SHA-256: f7e5b1eed62953673ae4570656e6dad7755543eeb2a22b86fe20095f23bdbdd4; retrieved 2026-09-18T21:06:58.896Z.
- Corrected after a review of the NTSB narrative, which states these values explicitly: destination. The narrative states the injuries occurred during the descent and approach and "THE LANDING AT DCA WAS COMPLETED WITHOUT FURTHER INCIDENT"; Reid-Hillview (RHV), San Jose, is not this 727 flight's destination.