Southwest Airlines Flight 1118
Boeing 737 7H4 · Accident: turbulence encounter on approach
From Chicago Midway International Airport (MDW) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- DCA23LA383
- 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
- Event fatalities
- Unknown
- 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
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
- N279WN
- Operator
- Southwest Airlines
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Chicago Midway International Airport (MDW), Chicago, ILTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 16 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
- Approach
- 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
Southwest Airlines flight 1118 encountered moderate turbulence while descending through 12,000 ft for landing at Pittsburg International Airport (PIT) Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, and a flight attendant fractured her wrist. The flight crew reported that while descending on the JESEY4 RNAV arrival into PIT they observed low cumulus clouds with tops at about 14,000 ft. The captain notified the flight attendants to take their seats due to the possibility of turbulence. As they descended through the cloud layer at about 12,000 ft the flight encountered an area of moderate turbulence for about 20-30 seconds. After receiving the notification from the captain to take their seats. The “B” and “C” position flight attendants (FAs) moved to their respective jumpseats and were attempting to fasten their safety harnesses when the turbulence event occurred. The “B” position FA was thrown into the air and impacted the jump seat. The “C” position FA was thrown into the air and impacted the aft lavatory fracturing her wrist. She described the turbulence as “like nothing I have ever felt almost like something hit the back of the airplane.” The flight crew stated that they were not notified of the injury until after the plane had landed and they were walking to their accommodations. At the time of the turbulence encounter there were no active significant meteorological information (SIGMETs), convective SIGMETs, airman’s meteorological information (AIRMETs), center weather advisories (CWAs), or pilot reports (PIREPs) of any significant turbulence other than occasional light turbulence/chop over the area.
Eddy dissipation rate (EDR) is a universal measure of turbulence rate. Recorded data from the airplane revealed that about 1929 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), or 1529 local, at an altitude of about 9,970 ft the EDR indicated 0.40 which equates to moderate turbulence. According to the flight crew, neither the clouds nor the turbulence were depicted on their Weather Services International (WSI) Pilotbrief weather application or displayed on their airplane weather radar.
Probable cause
An inadvertent encounter with convectively induced turbulence (CIT) during descent.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DCA23LA383
- Event ID
- 20230731192743
- Case number
- DCA23LA383
- 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: a33f2b722118f019797e9d05572111d4bc92c624319160ac5ac8f022844fa83b; retrieved 2026-09-16T17:55:44.124Z.