American Airlines Flight 1851
Airbus A321 231 · Accident: windshear or thunderstorm on approach
From Hartsfield Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL) to Charlotte Douglas International Airport (CLT)
Event
- NTSB case
- DCA15LA173
- 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
Airbus A321 231
- Aircraft type
- Airbus A321
- 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
- N564UW
- Operator
- American Airlines
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Hartsfield Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL), Atlanta, GATo Charlotte Douglas International Airport (CLT), Charlotte, NC
- Aircraft age
- About 3 years (built 2012)
- 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
- Approach · IFR final approach
- 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
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Environmental issues › Conditions/weather/phenomena
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight was descending for landing on runway 36L at CLT with full flaps while passing through scattered rain cells. ATC had informed the flight of a windshear advisory about 12 minutes prior to the landing attempt and of a windshear alert, indicating a pilot report of a 20 knot loss of airspeed on approach, about 1.5 minutes prior to the landing attempt. The captain did not reference the available windshear guidance in the quick reference handbook, which recommended landing with Flaps 3 and increasing the approach speed by 15 knots, and approached with Full flaps and no speed increment. The flight encountered a small microburst on short final about 7 seconds prior to the landing attempt characterized by wind shift from a headwind to a tailwind and back to a headwind. The captain began a go-around after receiving an aural windshear alert/warning from the airplane systems, however, the airplane lost speed and lift and landed hard on the runway suffering a tail strike before they were able to climb. The crew was vectored for a landing on runway 36C following the event and landed without further incident.
Probable cause
an encounter with a small microburst on short final at low altitude that resulted in a loss of lift and a tail strike during the go-around. Contributing to the accident was the captain's decision to continue the approach without applying appropriate windshear precautions in accordance with published guidance.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DCA15LA173
- Event ID
- 20150818X14949
- Case number
- DCA15LA173
- 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. 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: 65243de982ac28b3007b0f7f5c5ac562eaa922ec97109daa86df75daf9bacba3; retrieved 2026-09-16T02:41:16.560Z.