American Airlines Flight 279
Boeing 757 223 · Accident: abrupt maneuver en route
From Edinburgh Airport (EGPH) to John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK)
Event
- NTSB case
- DCA18LA285
- 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 757 223
- 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
- N173AN
- Operator
- American Airlines
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Edinburgh Airport (EGPH), EdinburghTo John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK), New York, NY
- Aircraft age
- About 16 years (built 2002)
- 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
- Abrupt maneuver
- 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 from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane was descending toward the destination airport with the autopilot and autothrottle systems engaged. As the airplane was approaching 12,000 ft, and the autopilot was capturing the altitude, the captain adjusted the altimeter resulting in a displayed altitude of 12,100 ft. The captain (the pilot flying) selected flight level change mode on the autopilot to recapture the altitude and set the speed at 250 knots to slow from about 255 knots. As a result, the autothrottles went to Throttle Hold mode when the throttle levers reached the aft stop. As the captain was briefing the approach, the airplane slowed and pitched up as it tried to maintain altitude with a reduced throttle setting. An international relief officer who was in the cockpit at the time commented on the airplane’s decreasing speed three times when the airplane’s airspeed was about 186 knots before stating that the captain should push the nose over. The captain disengaged the autopilot and auto throttles, aggressively pitched down, and increased the throttles. These aggressive maneuvers caused the flight attendants in the aft galley to be thrown against the ceiling. One flight attendant sustained a compound arm fracture; two other flight attendants sustained minor injuries. The crew subsequently landed the airplane without further incident.
Probable cause
The flight crew’s failure to adequately monitor the airplane’s airspeed, which led to the captain’s aggressive control inputs to increase airspeed; these aggressive inputs resulted in injuries to three cabin crewmembers.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DCA18LA285
- Event ID
- 20180907X10419
- Case number
- DCA18LA285
- 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: c7ebf577986f4035c65436494fa90d144946d8cd9bf96688af6a8c03eecb2a83; retrieved 2026-09-16T08:13:11.831Z.