British Airways Boeing 777 - 236 accident
Boeing 777 - 236 · Accident: turbulence encounter en route
From London Heathrow Airport (LHR) to Newark Liberty International Airport (EWR)
Event
- NTSB case
- DCA15CA136
- 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 - 236
- 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
- G-VIIY
- Operator
- British Airways
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From London Heathrow Airport (LHR), LondonTo Newark Liberty International Airport (EWR), Newark, NJ
- Aircraft age
- About 16 years (built 1999)
- 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 129: Foreign
- 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 as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
According to flight crew statements, they could see a line of clouds ahead of the airplane during descent and the flight encountered turbulence soon after entering the clouds.
FDR data indicated the airplane was level at 14,000 feet at about 280 knots when there was an approximately 10 second period of fluctuations in both vertical and lateral acceleration. The vertical acceleration fluctuated between about +.426 g's and +1.723 g's and lateral acceleration fluctuated from about +.156 g's to -.211 g's.
According to flight attendant (FA) statements, the flight encountered three "jolts" of turbulence about 30 minutes before landing. At the time of the turbulence, one FA was assisting a passenger with a drink in the aft galley. The FA braced herself during the turbulence, however, a passenger standing by the galley fell onto the FAs left lower leg, pinning her to the floor. The FA was assisted into the last row of seats in the cabin where she remained for the rest of the flight and the passenger required assistance to return to her seat.
The flight crew indicated that the seatbelt sign was selected on about 5 minutes prior to the turbulence encounter, however, no PA announcement was made. The FAs reported that the seatbelt sign was not turned on until after a FA called the flight deck after the turbulence encounter. The flight crew advised ATC of the injuries and requested paramedics meet the airplane at EWR. The FA was transported to the hospital and diagnosed with two acute fractures of the left fibula.
Probable cause
an inadvertent encounter with convective turbulence resulting in serious injury to a flight attendant.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DCA15CA136
- Event ID
- 20150618X30530
- Case number
- DCA15CA136
- 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, 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: 11fbbd83b75c4738e76dfd908d2eb9e65e59356de3e7264e5bdade4649eda18b; retrieved 2026-09-16T02:26:24.286Z.