Delta Air Lines Flight 419
Boeing 767 332 · Accident: turbulence encounter en route
From Atlanta, GA to San Juan, PR
Event
- NTSB case
- DCA09CA051
- 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 767 332
- Aircraft type
- Boeing 767
- 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
- N129DL
- Operator
- Delta Air Lines
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Atlanta, GATo San Juan, PR
- Aircraft age
- About 21 years (built 1988)
- 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 · cruise
- 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
- Turbulence encounter
- 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
- Environmental issues › Conditions/weather/phenomena
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
On May 20, 2009, at 1230 eastern daylight time, Delta Airlines flight 419, a Boeing 767, N129DL, encountered turbulence while enroute from Atlanta, Georgia, to San Juan, Puerto Rico. The captain stated that preflight information and enroute reports indicated only light chop for the flight and he communicated this to the flight attendants. About 10 minutes before the turbulence encounter, the captain turned on the seat belt sign and made an announcement for the passengers to remain in their seats with the seat belt fastened because they would be deviating around weather ahead. After deviating around the weather and with no weather returns on the radar, the flight encountered turbulence that lasted for about 20 seconds. At the time of the turbulence encounter, the airplane was in cruise at Flight Level 350. One of the flight attendants in the back of the airplane was thrown from her jump seat to the floor and injured. Two doctors and a nurse assisted the injured flight attendant. The flight crew declared an emergency and was given direct routing to San Juan. The injured flight attendant was transported to the hospital, where she was subsequently diagnosed with a fractured femur.
Probable cause
Inadvertent encounter with convective turbulence while in cruise.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DCA09CA051
- Event ID
- 20090527X25328
- Case number
- DCA09CA051
- Dataset
- full-current
- Source SHA-256
- 5cf380f0061817c0331a6b2d8cc7e0ee3a79bea469a1001dc5c10e56f35f5ab3
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, 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: 5b482e306cee91144569535cc53ede3cf06b2e08db329a1ecaab705dc856acbc; retrieved 2026-09-15T11:12:45.525Z.