Mesaba Aviation Flight 3194
Saab 340B · Incident: cabin safety event en route
From Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport (KDTW) to Marquette Sawyer Regional Airport (KSAW)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN09IA606
- 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
- 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
Saab 340B
- Aircraft type
- Saab 340
- 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
- N452XJ
- Operator
- Mesaba Aviation
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport (KDTW), Detroit, MITo Marquette Sawyer Regional Airport (KSAW), Marquette, MI
- 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
- 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
- Cabin safety event
- 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
- Personnel issues › Physical
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
While in cruise flight, the cockpit crew was alerted by a passenger that the single flight attendant had become "no longer coherent" and was performing "numerous unusual activities." The captain instructed the passenger to get the flight attendant seated and the beverage cart stowed, and then diverted to a nearby airport. The flight attendant was transported to a local emergency room and diagnosed with "acute anxiety." There were no indications that the flight attendant had any pre-existing medical or psychiatric conditions. According to 14 Code of Federal Regulations 121.391, a single flight attendant was required for the incident flight. In addition, there are no medical standards for flight attendants currently stipulated by federal regulations.
Probable cause
The flight attendant's incapacitation due to an anxiety attack.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN09IA606
- Event ID
- 20090925X65328
- Case number
- CEN09IA606
- 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: 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 2009-07-31.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 7509476d725a3310d8ec49b1061c23b909441081caa6b0e17981bbe37d64323b; retrieved 2026-09-15T13:20:54.928Z.