United Airlines Flight 1945
Boeing 737 924 · Accident: turbulence encounter en route
From Seattle–Tacoma International Airport (KSEA) to George Bush Intercontinental Airport (KIAH)
Event
- NTSB case
- DCA16CA214
- 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 737 924
- 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
- N37408
- Operator
- United Airlines
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Seattle–Tacoma International Airport (KSEA), Seattle, WATo George Bush Intercontinental Airport (KIAH), Houston, TX
- Aircraft age
- About 15 years (built 2001)
- 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 as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
On August 17, 2016, about 1215 central daylight time, United Airlines flight 1945, a Boeing 737-924, N37408, encountered moderate turbulence near Waco, Texas, while on the approach to land at George Bush Intercontinental Airport (KIAH), Houston, Texas. Of the 142 passengers and crew onboard, one flight attendant received a serious injury. The airplane was not damaged. The flight was operating under the provision of 14 CFR Part 121 as a scheduled domestic passenger flight from Seattle-Takoma International Airport (KSEA), Seattle, Washington.
The captain was the pilot monitoring, and the first officer the pilot flying. About 40 minutes from landing, the captain called the cabin and asked the flight attendants to prepare the cabin early and be seated because he anticipated light chop/turbulence. As the flight was descending from FL330 feet to FL240 on the GUSHR2 RNAV arrival the airplane and was in and out of cumulus and stratus clouds. The seatbelt sign was illuminated, and the weather radar was on but there were no indications of turbulence depicted in front of the airplane, though the crew could see that the weather was building rather than dissipating with scattered cumulus clouds all around. As the flight entered one small cloud, the airplane encountered a very brief duration of moderate turbulence. The autopilot did not disengage. Shortly after, they received a call from the cabin informing them that one of the flight attendants had been injured.
At the time of the turbulence, the flight attendants (FA) were finishing their passenger compliance checks and securing the galleys. One of the aft FAs was in the process of securing the final latches in the galley when she was tossed about the galley, seriously injuring her right ankle. The other FAs assisted with stabilizing her and the flight landed without further incident. Paramedics met the airplane at the gate and the FA was transported to the hospital where she was diagnosed with a broken ankle.
Probable cause
an encounter with convective turbulence.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DCA16CA214
- Event ID
- 20160822X94859
- Case number
- DCA16CA214
- 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: 391a81708bdaba22ab5575d83e182c1de4da36341368f89b7efc8c6032680e32; retrieved 2026-09-16T04:11:07.088Z.