EVA Air Flight 015
Boeing 777 35EER · Incident: air traffic event en route
From Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) to Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport (RCTP)
Event
- NTSB case
- OPS17IA010
- 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
- Incident
- 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
- Event fatalities
- Unknown
- 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
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
Boeing 777 35EER
- 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
- B-16726
- Operator
- EVA Air
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), Los Angeles, CATo Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport (RCTP), Taiwan Taoyuan
- 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 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 · climb to cruise
- 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
- Air traffic 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 › Action/decision
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
A near controlled flight into terrain (CFIT) incident occurred near Mt. Wilson, California, when a Boeing 777-300 departing Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) was instructed to turn left toward rising terrain after departure from runway 07R. The aircraft was operating on a 14 Code of Federal Regulations Part 129 international flight. Air traffic control services were provided by the Federal Aviation Administration Southern California Terminal Radar Approach Control (SCT TRACON). There was no damage reported to the aircraft, and no reported injuries to the passengers or crew.
Due to weather in the area, LAX was operating in an east flow configuration with aircraft departing to the east. The Boeing 777-300 pilot contacted the SCT controller and was given an initial climb to 7,000 feet. A short time later, the SCT controller instructed the pilot to turn left to a heading of 180 degrees which required a left 270 degree turn. The turn resulted in the aircraft turning toward rising terrain and back toward the airport; normal procedures in an east flow would have been for a right turn to a heading of 180 degrees. While in the left turn, the pilot requested a high speed climb which resulted in the aircraft accelerating beyond the 250 knot LAX class B speed restriction and required additional airspace in order to complete an assigned turn. After recognizing the aircraft was in a left turn, the SCT controller issued the crew a right turn to a heading of 180 degrees. As the aircraft began to turn right, the air traffic controller instructed the crew to expedite the turn due to recognizing a developing proximity issue with another aircraft that had departed from LAX. The air traffic controller stopped the climb of the B777-300 and issued a left turn to a heading of 270 degrees. These turns in quick succession, combined with the speed of the aircraft, resulted in the flight tracking northbound toward rising terrain. The closest lateral and vertical proximity between the airplane and terrain/obstructions was about 0.3 miles and 0 ft, respectively, which is less than the minimum separation requirements.
Probable cause
The incident was caused by the air traffic controller assigning the pilots a left turn instead of the required right turn after departure which placed the aircraft in an unsafe proximity with terrain and obstructions. Contributing to the incident was the air traffic controller's inadequate recovery technique during the development of the incident.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record OPS17IA010
- Event ID
- 20170104X45517
- Case number
- OPS17IA010
- Dataset
- full-current
- Source SHA-256
- 5cf380f0061817c0331a6b2d8cc7e0ee3a79bea469a1001dc5c10e56f35f5ab3
Source notes (5)
- 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: 298cab00391024fd73f570cd9b237ef1e0fd40104941af0c008f0ec2893dbbb9; retrieved 2026-09-16T04:55:50.648Z.
- Corrected after a review of the NTSB narrative, which states these values explicitly: departure. Narrative says the Boeing 777 departed Los Angeles International Airport (LAX); Mt. Wilson is the incident location, not the departure city.