SATA International Airbus Industrie A310 incident
Airbus Industrie A310 · Incident
Event
- NTSB case
- DCA08WA049
- 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
- Unknown · led by another country; figures from NTSB notifications
- 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
- Not recorded
Airbus Industrie A310
- Aircraft type
- Airbus A310
- 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
- Unknown
- Operator
- SATA International
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo not recorded
- 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
- Non-U.S., Commercial
- 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
- Not recorded
- Defining eventThe 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
- Not recorded
- 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
No findings designated as a cause are recorded in the NTSB data yet.
Not plotted · Location withheld: coordinates are missing, conflicting, invalid, or have no accepted acquisition method. No substitute location has been invented.
NTSB narrative
On January 28, 2007 at 2303 UTC, SATA International flight RZO-128, Portuguese registration CS-TSM, Airbus A310, experienced an uncommanded extension of a flight spoiler during cruise flight. The 9 crewmembers and 181 passengers were not injured. The aircraft was not damaged. The flight departed Ponta Delgada, Azores (LPPD) and the destination was Lisbon, Portugal (LPPT).
The aircraft was en route at FL 380 and after passing waypoint "BELKIN", the number 6R spoiler extended and remained so even after the Abnormal Checklist Actions had been performed. The Automatic Pilot (AP) disengaged and the aircraft became difficult to control. The crew flew the airplane manually until reaching a lower altitude, when the AP was reengaged with the CWS. The flight was diverted to Santa Maria and landed without incident.
The incident was investigated by the Portuguese Cabinet of Prevention and Investigation of Aircraft (GPIAA).
Verbatim NTSB factual narrative from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DCA08WA049
- Event ID
- 20080418X00512
- Case number
- DCA08WA049
- 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: damage. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the UTC date the NTSB stores; the local time zone is not recorded, so the local date may differ by a day.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 31b98f73eaf1605b0cc7e4d6c22019df3a47fdbf228c101fb403a3103cedcfda; retrieved 2026-09-18T14:47:29.468Z.