Aer Lingua Flight 114
Boeing 757 200 · Accident: ground handling event during pushback
From Philadelphia International Airport (PHL) to Dublin Airport (EIDW)
Event
- NTSB case
- DCA18CA272
- 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 757 200
- Aircraft type
- Boeing 757
- 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
- EI-LBT
- Operator
- Aer Lingua
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Philadelphia International Airport (PHL), Philadelphia, PATo Dublin Airport (EIDW), Dublin
- Aircraft age
- About 20 years (built 1998)
- 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
- Pushback/towing · engine not operating
- 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
- Ground handling 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 from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
On August 24, 2018, about 2350 eastern daylight time, Aer Lingus flight 114, a Boeing 757-200, EI-LBT, had a ground service employee suffer a serious injury while engaged in pushback from the gate at Philadelphia International Airport (KPHL), Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. There were no injuries to 177 passengers and crew onboard. The airplane was not damaged. The flight was operated as a Title 14 Code of Federal Regulations Part 129 scheduled international passenger flight from KPHL to Dublin Airport (EIDW), Dublin, Ireland. According to the operator, the ground service employee was connected to the airplane via a headset and was engaged in push-back from gate A6. At some point, the service employee fell down and the nose wheel ran over his right leg, causing a serious injury. The flight crew reported that the pushback was nearly complete and were about halfway through the 90 degree turn onto the taxi line, when the airplane jerked to a stop. There was general confusion for several minutes before they were informed of what happened.
Probable cause
The ground service employee's inadvertent fall near the nose wheel during pushback.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DCA18CA272
- Event ID
- 20180828X94249
- Case number
- DCA18CA272
- 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, coordinates, 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: e940f4b38a873bbf015b8fdfd88f8beea751ca375faa2e5f6c6d2eb647719231; retrieved 2026-09-16T08:10:28.403Z.