Southwest Airlines Flight 2842
Boeing 737-8H4 · Accident: turbulence encounter en route
From Chicago Midway International Airport (KMDW) to Jacksonville International Airport (KJAX)
Event
- NTSB case
- DCA19CA151
- 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
- Visual Meteorological Cond
Boeing 737-8H4
- 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
- N8697C
- Operator
- Southwest Airlines
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Chicago Midway International Airport (KMDW), Chicago, ILTo Jacksonville International Airport (KJAX), Jacksonville, FL
- Aircraft age
- About 3 years (built 2016)
- 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
- 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
- None
Cause areas
- Environmental issues › Conditions/weather/phenomena
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
On May 25, 2019, about 1715 eastern daylight time, Southwest Airlines flight 2842, a Boeing 737-8H4, N8697C, encountered turbulence during descent into Jacksonville International Airport (KJAX), Jacksonville, Florida. Of the 128 passengers and crew onboard, one flight attendant sustained serious injuries and one flight attendant sustained minor injuries. The airplane was not damaged. The flight was operating under 14 CFR Part 121 as a regularly scheduled passenger flight from Chicago Midway International Airport (KMDW), Chicago, Illinois, to KJAX. According to the captain, as the flight approached 15,000 feet, he noticed there was a scattered layer of clouds they needed to descend through, and so he elected to provide the 10,000-foot chime to the flight attendants early. As the flight descended through the layer at about 12,000 feet, the airplane encountered moderate turbulence. The seat belt sign was off, and the flight crew had turned off the weather radar about 5 minutes before because they had observed no weather between the airplane and KJAX.
According to the flight attendants (FA), the turbulence was encountered shortly after they received the 10,000-foot chime and begun their final walkthrough of the cabin. The two FAs in the aft cabin were thrown into the air and then struck the floor. One of the injured FAs was transferred to a passenger seat for the remainder of the flight. The flight crew was notified of the injury, who requested that paramedics meet the airplane at the gate. After landing, the two aft FAs were transported to the hospital where one was diagnosed with a fractured ankle.
Post accident examination of the weather data determined that the turbulence was encountered in the vicinity of the sea breeze front and localized convergence where towering cumulus clouds (cumulus congestus clouds) were depicted on the satellite imagery. There was no lightning detected, pilot reports (PIREPs), or inflight advisories for convection or turbulence current for the area.
Probable cause
an encounter with convectively induced turbulence while penetrating cumulus clouds during descent.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DCA19CA151
- Event ID
- 20190528X32306
- Case number
- DCA19CA151
- 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, cause areas, 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: 4e159da0aeb1f4f8b4809606de3024a912f44c344b03e59b951f911b8ee1c240; retrieved 2026-09-16T09:04:23.203Z.