Delta Air Lines Boeing 777-232 accident
Boeing 777-232 · Accident: turbulence encounter en route
From Dubai International Airport (OMDB) to Hartsfield Jackson Atlanta International Airport (KATL)
Event
- NTSB case
- DCA13CA128
- 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 777-232
- Aircraft type
- Boeing 777
- 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
- N863DA
- Operator
- Delta Air Lines
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Dubai International Airport (OMDB), DubaiTo Hartsfield Jackson Atlanta International Airport (KATL), Atlanta, GA
- 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 · descent
- 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 from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
According to the flight and cabin crew statements, Atlanta Approach Control advised the crew that radar was showing an area of rain on the arrival route although the flight crew did not see any areas of precipitation on the airborne weather radar. During the descent to 11,000 feet the seatbelt sign was illuminated and the captain, who was the pilot monitoring, cycled the seatbelt sign and called the flight attendant (FA) at the 1L door via the interphone to notify the cabin crew to be seated. Before the 1L flight attendant was able to relay the message to all of the FAs to be seated, as they were all preparing the cabin for arrival, the airplane encountered several distinct jolts of turbulence. According to the flight data recorder data, as the airplane was descending through about 13,200 feet, the vertical acceleration fluctuated between +1.56 g's and +0.024 g's over a period of about 10 seconds.
During the turbulence the 4Rc FA who was in the aisle near the 3R door was lifted into the air and fell back down to the floor on her feet and knees. The FA was assisted to the 3R jumpseat, the flight crew was notified of the injury, and they requested paramedics meet the airplane upon arrival
The 4Rc FA was transported to the hospital where she was diagnosed with two broken ankles.
Probable cause
Unexpected encounter with convective turbulence while the flight attendants were preparing the cabin for arrival.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DCA13CA128
- Event ID
- 20130712X61436
- Case number
- DCA13CA128
- 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: 89f79246e3f02e23dbe7587f14ebd39a26beb4035ea809b151c1a8920b81afd4; retrieved 2026-09-15T22:11:58.902Z.