Delta Air Lines Flight 143
Boeing 767 432ER · Accident: cabin safety event en route
From Frankfurt Main Airport (FRA) to Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport (DTW)
Event
- NTSB case
- DCA12CA045
- 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
- Unknown
Boeing 767 432ER
- Aircraft type
- Boeing 767
- 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
- N829MH
- Operator
- Delta Air Lines
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Frankfurt Main Airport (FRA), FrankfurtTo Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport (DTW), Detroit, 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 › Miscellaneous
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
On February 26, 2012, about 1036 coordinated universal time, Delta Air Lines flight 143, a Boeing 767-432ER, N829MH, one flight attendant received serious injuries while delivering meal service. The flight was operating under the provisions of 14 CFR Part 121 as a scheduled international passenger flight from Frankfurt Airport, Frankfurt, Germany to Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport, Detroit, Michigan.
According to flight crew statements, about one hour and thirty minutes into the flight while the airplane was in cruise, one of the flight attendant tripped over a passenger's bag during meal service and received a serious injury as a result of the fall.
Probable cause
the flight attendant inadvertently tripping over a passenger's luggage strap that was protruding into the isle.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DCA12CA045
- Event ID
- 20120302X00956
- Case number
- DCA12CA045
- 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, coordinates, 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: 0e54b0d3807d57dd64c200789458f821616d9981e4fd44fe8211605b10df32b8; retrieved 2026-09-15T17:21:46.663Z.