American Eagle Airlines Flight 4355
Embraer EMB-145LR · Accident: turbulence encounter en route
From OKC Will Rogers World Airport (OKC) to Chicago O'Hare International Airport (ORD)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN11LA250
- 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
Embraer EMB-145LR
- Aircraft type
- Embraer EMB-145
- 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
- N931AE
- Operator
- American Eagle Airlines
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From OKC Will Rogers World Airport (OKC), Oklahoma City, OKTo Chicago O'Hare International Airport (ORD), Chicago, IL
- 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
- 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
During climb to cruise flight, the flight attendant was returning to her jumpseat when the airplane encountered convectively induced turbulence associated with developing thunderstorms under the flight path. The flight attendant lost her footing and hit her head on the service galley door. While trying to find something to grab, the flight attendant fell again and injured her wrist and knee. She advised the flight crew that she would be unable to complete her duties and the flight was diverted to seek medical attention for the flight attendant. The operator subsequently confirmed that the flight attendant was seriously injured when her wrist and hand sustained fractures. The flight’s flight data recorder data showed that an upset event occurred during climb; the vertical acceleration ranged from 1.54g to 0.60g in a 1-second period.
Probable cause
An in-flight encounter with convectively induced turbulence associated with developing thunderstorms under the flight path during the airplane's climb to cruise flight.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN11LA250
- Event ID
- 20110328X80923
- Case number
- CEN11LA250
- 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: 3ed94c93e461b31485fc7fe41292ed33ad6899dfde735639461390da1a91b7e7; retrieved 2026-09-15T15:58:58.256Z.