Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 7H4 accident
Boeing 737 7H4 · Accident: cabin safety event en route
From Nashville International Airport (KBNA) to Charlotte Douglas International Airport (KCLT)
Event
- NTSB case
- DCA19CA005
- 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 737 7H4
- 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
- N287WN
- Operator
- Southwest Airlines
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Nashville International Airport (KBNA), Nashville, TNTo Charlotte Douglas International Airport (KCLT), Charlotte, NC
- Aircraft age
- About 11 years (built 2007)
- 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
- Cabin safety 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 › 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
On October 9, 2018, about 2300 EDT, Southwest Airlines 2235, a Boeing 737-700, N287WN, was enroute to Charlotte-Douglas International Airport (KCLT), Charlotte, North Carolina, when a flight attendant was burned with hot liquid. Of the 93 passengers and crew onboard, one flight attendant received a serious injury. The regularly scheduled domestic passenger flight was operating under 14 Code of Federal Regulations Part 121 from Nashville International Airport (KBNA), Nashville, Tennessee, to KCLT. As the flight attendant (FA) was conducting cabin service, she tripped over a passenger's knee, causing her to spill her beverage tray. One of the beverages was a hot tea, and it splashed on her left forearm and on the passenger's shoulder and arm. After landing, paramedics treated both the passenger and flight attendant at the gate, however, both declined to be transported to a local hospital for further examination. The following day the FA was still in pain and went to a local medical clinic where she was diagnosed with a 2nd degree burn to her forearm.
Probable cause
flight attendant tripping over a passenger's knee that resulted in hot liquid splashing on the flight attendant.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DCA19CA005
- Event ID
- 20181012X03918
- Case number
- DCA19CA005
- 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, coordinates, damage. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2018-10-10.
- API snapshot SHA-256: d9c7fceaafaaa00b30ace0cef95407de1110262cf3a8d1092cec40cddd274232; retrieved 2026-09-16T08:20:00.226Z.