American Airlines Flight 488
Boeing B737-800 · Accident: in flight encounter with weather en route
From Dallas Fort Worth International Airport (DFW) to Toronto Pearson International Airport (YYZ)
Event
- NTSB case
- DFW07LA164
- 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
- Visual Meteorological Cond
Boeing B737-800
- 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
- N929AN
- Operator
- American Airlines
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Dallas Fort Worth International Airport (DFW), Dal-Fort Worth, TXTo Toronto Pearson International Airport (YYZ), Toronto
- 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
- Weather condition › Turbulence
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The captain reported that the international flight encountered moderate clear air turbulence while the flight was climbing through 30,000 feet mean sea level (FL300). The captain further reported that the seat belt sign was illuminated and passengers were seated at the time of the short turbulence encounter. Both the captain and the first officer had monitored the weather radar, and neither detected any weather anomalies during the climb to altitude. There were no forecast for turbulence in the area of the encounter. The three flight attendants in the cabin area were performing crew duties when the unexpected turbulence occurred. One flight attendant in the aft galley injured her foot which resulted in a bone fracture.
Probable cause
An in-flight encounter with clear air turbulence, which resulted in a serious injury to a flight attendant.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DFW07LA164
- Event ID
- 20071130X01878
- Case number
- DFW07LA164
- Dataset
- historical-pre2008
- Source SHA-256
- 89e2df6d848e7ab3b42e7d7c7a03ff403303057a26ca04c95b3ea67201c3ce74
Source notes (4)
- 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, coordinates, 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: 795ee230c44ff7cf1fb21d2ce1a2ed6460396a2b288ad40ff3260b119795d17f; retrieved 2026-09-18T14:43:14.662Z.