American Eagle Airlines Flight EGF3376
Embraer EMB-145LR · Incident: windshear or thunderstorm en route
From Dallas Fort Worth International Airport (DFW) to Dane County Regional Truax Field (MSN)
Event
- NTSB case
- OPS12IA303
- 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
- Not recorded
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
- N639AE
- Operator
- American Eagle Airlines
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Dallas Fort Worth International Airport (DFW), Fort Worth, TXTo Dane County Regional Truax Field (MSN), Madison, WI
- 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
- Windshear or thunderstorm
- 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
A regional jet departed from Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport on a scheduled passenger flight to Madison, Wisconsin. About 15 minutes after takeoff, the crew declared an emergency because the airplane had been struck by lightning and requested to divert to Little Rock, Arkansas. After landing, the airplane was inspected and found to have sustained damage from the lightning strike requiring repairs to the left wing skin and rivets and replacement of the left wingtip and aileron.
At the time of the incident, the airplane was being handled by controllers at the Fort Worth Air Traffic Control Center. Significant convective weather was in the area and along the airplane's route, resulting in closures of several routes into and out of the Dallas area. The controllers did not provide specific information on the location of the convective activity along the airplane's route until the crew asked for the information. However, in response to a question, the controllers did advise the crew that there was moderate to heavy precipitation ahead. The crew attempted to identify areas where they could divert to avoid the convective activity, but the controller was unable to approve significant deviations because of other traffic flows in the vicinity. Shortly afterward, the lightning strike occurred. Because of the lightning strike and requests for weather deviations by other aircraft flying through the same area, the center's Traffic Management Unit began rerouting aircraft away from the area and toward other routes less affected by convective weather. When interviewed, traffic management staff noted that this pattern was normal: it was not unusual to wait until pilots refused to fly a route because of weather impact before discontinuing its use.
This incident was included as an example in a recommendation letter to the FAA, available at http://www.ntsb.gov/doclib/recletters/2012/A-12-018-020.pdf, which recommends improved transmission of real-time lightning data to both controllers and pilots.
Probable cause
The flight's continued operation through an area containing substantial convective weather activity. Contributing to the accident was the air traffic control/traffic management unit's lack of awareness and recognition of the effect of weather movement on the departure route in use and the flight crew's acceptance of a route and limited weather deviation that was inadequate to maintain a safe distance from the thunderstorms in the area.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record OPS12IA303
- Event ID
- 20120207X14951
- Case number
- OPS12IA303
- 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 2012-01-25.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 1f438d5dcf65476407db337b129b6b3fab4fd70a9259c526f0c111f0c7b73b9a; retrieved 2026-09-15T17:11:16.815Z.