Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 3H4 accident
Boeing 737 3H4 · Accident: cabin safety event en route
From Manchester-Boston Regional Airport (MHT) to Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport (BWI)
Event
- NTSB case
- DCA16CA008
- 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 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
- N383SW
- Operator
- Southwest Airlines
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Manchester-Boston Regional Airport (MHT), Manchester, NHTo Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport (BWI), Baltimore, MD
- Aircraft age
- About 21 years (built 1994)
- 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 › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
As a flight attendant (FA) was moving from the galley to the cabin to serve a tray of drinks, a cup of hot water fell off the tray and spilled onto her arm resulting in 2nd degree burns to her forearm and bicep, measuring about 1 inch by 2 inches, and separation of skin.
The crew reported the flight encountered some light turbulence enroute but it was not determined if any was encountered at the time of the event.
Probable cause
hot water spilled from a cup onto the flight attendant's arm resulting in a 2nd degree burn.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DCA16CA008
- Event ID
- 20151022X65901
- Case number
- DCA16CA008
- 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: ec2000f188539ef94ff348bd61562bf48afbf074380207451da657fd9dee4c96; retrieved 2026-09-16T02:55:05.203Z.