Southwest Airlines Boeing 737-3H4 accident
Boeing 737-3H4 · Accident: cabin safety event en route
From OKC Will Rogers World Airport (KOKC) to Harry Reid International Airport (KLAS)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR13CA016
- 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
Boeing 737-3H4
- 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
- N625SW
- Operator
- Southwest Airlines
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From OKC Will Rogers World Airport (KOKC), Oklahoma City, OKTo Harry Reid International Airport (KLAS), Las Vegas, NV
- 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
- 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
- Environmental issues › Task environment
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
Southwest Airlines personnel reported that, during cruise flight between Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and Las Vegas, Nevada, a flight attendant who was conducting beverage service tripped over a passenger's leg that was protruding into the aisle. The flight attendant fell and felt pain in her left knee and foot. She did not resume her flight attendant duties during the flight. After landing she went to a local hospital, where medical personnel determined that she had a fractured metatarsal in her left foot.
There were no mechanical difficulties or anomalies with the airplane during the flight, and the event was not related to turbulence.
Probable cause
The flight attendant's encounter with an unseen obstruction in the aisle, which resulted in a fall.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR13CA016
- Event ID
- 20121018X62210
- Case number
- WPR13CA016
- 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, coordinates, damage. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2012-10-17.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 169d3e7de68c10986447ef15ec46a8721ea4e47c03c26d412d52b70001f36ac7; retrieved 2026-09-15T20:12:37.199Z.