Southwest Airlines Flight 111
Boeing 737-300 · Accident: in flight encounter with weather on approach
From Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport (BHM) to Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport (BWI)
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC07LA105
- 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 737-300
- 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
- N648SW
- Operator
- Southwest Airlines
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport (BHM), Birmingham, ALTo Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport (BWI), Baltimore, MD
- 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
- Approach
- 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
- Flightcrew › Weather forecast, not coordinated/diseminated
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight was descending through a layer of broken clouds during approach for landing when it encountered turbulence. A flight attendant who was standing in the aft galley sustained a fractured ankle. The weather packet issued to the flight crew contained airmen's meteorological information which warned of moderate turbulence for altitudes below 12,000 feet in the accident location. The operator's procedures required the flight crew to brief the cabin crew prior to each flight regarding the forecast turbulence for the trip, but the injured flight attendant stated that the briefing did not contain any significant turbulence potential information, and that there were not any en route turbulence updates.
Probable cause
An in-flight encounter with turbulence and the flight crew's failure to advise the cabin crew about potential forecast turbulence, as reported by the flight attendant.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC07LA105
- Event ID
- 20070520X00598
- Case number
- NYC07LA105
- 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: 40368b45704f7acc567a54b50f7768b2e9ae6e56b775a6da2d77f436d7bc31dd; retrieved 2026-09-18T14:45:08.186Z.
- The NTSB's operator name is blank for N648SW; the operator shown is the name the NTSB's other records give its FAA operator code, SWAA.