Delta Air Lines Airbus Industrie A319-100 accident
Airbus Industrie A319-100 · Accident: turbulence encounter en route
From LaGuardia Airport (LGA) to PBI · West Palm Beach, FL
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA10CA174
- 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
Airbus Industrie A319-100
- Aircraft type
- Airbus A319
- 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
- N319NB
- Operator
- Delta Air Lines
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From LaGuardia Airport (LGA), New York, NYTo PBI · West Palm Beach, FL
- 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 · 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
The air carrier flight had been experiencing light, occasionally moderate, turbulence throughout the flight. The captain had asked the flight attendants to secure the cabin earlier than usual, while they were in light turbulence, because the conditions were not expected to improve before arrival at the destination airport. The airplane was at flight level 240, when the flight attendants began the final preparation for landing. During that time, with no echoes depicted on the weather radar, the airplane experienced unexpected severe turbulence for 1 to 2 seconds. The maximum g recorded was 1.773 and the minimum g recorded was 0.391. All three flight attendants were standing at the time, preparing the cabin, when they were jolted upward and then fell to the floor. Two of the flight attendants sustained minor injuries, while one flight attendant was seriously injured. The airplane was not damaged and landed uneventfully at the destination airport.
Probable cause
An inadvertent in-flight encounter with turbulence, resulting in an injury to a cabin attendant.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA10CA174
- Event ID
- 20100312X84023
- Case number
- ERA10CA174
- 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: 20fa58a0b6ebfe431a9e2e3c8903ba008eee2a8b79f023641c9195517932b7f0; retrieved 2026-09-15T13:44:43.814Z.