Sunwing Airlines Flight 531
Boeing 737 8Q8 · Incident
From Toronto Pearson International Airport (YYZ) to Cozumel International Airport (CZM)
Event
- NTSB case
- DCA11WA104
- 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
- Event fatalities
- Unknown
- 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
Boeing 737 8Q8
- Aircraft type
- Boeing 737
- 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
- C-FTAH
- Operator
- Sunwing Airlines
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Toronto Pearson International Airport (YYZ), TorontoTo Cozumel International Airport (CZM), Cozumel
- 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 March 13, 2011, at 0657 eastern daylight time, a Boeing 737-8Q8 aircraft, registration C-FTAH, experienced stall stickshaker and overspeed clacker warnings upon takeoff from Toronto/Lester B. Pearson International Airport (YYZ), Ontario, Canada. The crew advised air traffic control of a technical problem and returned to YYZ. The airplane was not damaged and no injuries occurred. The flight was registered to and operated by Sunwing Airlines as flight 531 on a flight from YYZ to Cozumel International Airport (CZM), Quintana Roo, Mexico.
The investigation is being conducted by the Transportation Safety Board (TSB) of Canada. The NTSB designated a U.S. Accredited Representative as the state of manufacture to assist the TSB's investigation.
All inquiries should be directed to:
Transportation Safety Board of Canada 200 Promenade du Portage Place du Centre, 4th Floor Hull, Quebec K1A 1K8 Canada
Website: http://www.tsb.gc.ca
Verbatim NTSB factual narrative from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DCA11WA104
- Event ID
- 20110927X03113
- Case number
- DCA11WA104
- 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: 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: 4880162d85e14a22ad91cece0a12230831c39b6742eb000e79872668fbbfb0a4; retrieved 2026-09-15T16:46:54.229Z.