American Airlines Flight 2588
McDonnell Douglas DC 9 83(MD-83) · Accident: turbulence encounter en route
From Toronto Pearson International Airport (YYZ) to Dallas Fort Worth International Airport (DFW)
Event
- NTSB case
- DCA17CA079
- 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
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
McDonnell Douglas DC 9 83(MD-83)
- Aircraft type
- McDonnell Douglas DC-9
- 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
- N9615W
- Operator
- American Airlines
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Toronto Pearson International Airport (YYZ), TorontoTo Dallas Fort Worth International Airport (DFW), Dallas-Fort Worth, TX
- Aircraft age
- About 20 years (built 1997)
- 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
- 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
- Minor
Cause areas
- Environmental issues › Conditions/weather/phenomena
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
On March 9, 2017 at 1915 central standard time, American Airlines flight 2588, a Boeing MD-83, N9615W, from Toronto, Ontario, Canada to Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport (DFW), encountered turbulence at flight level 280 (FL280) during cruise flight from Toronto, Ontario, Canada to Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport (DFW), Dallas, Texas, resulting in a serious injury to one of the flight attendants (FA). None of the other passengers and crew members were injured and the airplane received minor damage.
According to the operator, while enroute to DFW at FL 280, in intermittent IMC conditions at 0.74 Mach, the flight crew was deviating left of assigned course to avoid weather and was northeast of Memphis . The seat belt sign was on and the on-board radar was not depicting any precipitation. The aircraft experienced unexpected turbulence. The #2 and the #4 FAs were seated in their jumpseats in the rear of the aircraft, however, their seatbelts were not fastened. Both the #2 and the #4 FAs struck the overhead ceiling panel and fell to the floor. No passengers reported injuries and the FAs were able to complete their duties. Emergency Medical Service personnel met the FAs at the gate and transported to the hospital. Both FAs were treated and released from the hospital that evening, however, the #2 FA was later diagnosed with fractures to her vertebrae.
Probable cause
an inadvertent encounter with convective turbulence.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DCA17CA079
- Event ID
- 20170317X92137
- Case number
- DCA17CA079
- 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: local date, investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2017-03-10.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 8a9bee4139cecc6219fc8caa670be359647f254e5f6c6af9f36290e17e3b8f54; retrieved 2026-09-16T05:06:06.736Z.