Southwest Airlines Flight 2294
Boeing 737 3H4 · In-flight structural failure leading to rapid decompression
From Nashville International Airport (BNA) to Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport (BWI)
Event
- NTSB case
- DCA09FA065
- 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
- 0 · all aircraft and ground
- Ground fatalities
- Unknown
- Occupants
- 131
- Survivors
- 131
- InjuriesFatal: death within 30 days. Serious: over 48 hours in hospital within a week, most broken bones, severe bleeding, nerve or organ damage, or serious burns. Minor: anything less. Glossary
- 0 serious · 0 minor (NTSB)
- 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
- Not recorded
Boeing 737 3H4
- Flight
- WN2294
- 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
- N387SW
- Operator
- Southwest Airlines
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Nashville International Airport (BNA), Nashville, TNTo Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport (BWI), Baltimore, MD
- Aircraft age
- Not recorded
- 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 · cruise
- 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
- Aircraft structural failure
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Aircraft › Aircraft structures
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
From the Wikipedia article
Southwest Airlines Flight 2294 was a scheduled US passenger aircraft flight which suffered a rapid depressurization of the passenger cabin on July 13, 2009. The Boeing 737-300 made an emergency landing at Yeager Airport in Charleston, West Virginia, with no fatalities or major injuries to passengers and crew. Investigation performed by the National Transportation Safety Board concluded that the incident was caused by a failure in the fuselage skin due to metal fatigue.
Incident
The aircraft involved was a Boeing 737-3H4, registered as N387SW, with serial number 26602. 126 passengers and 5 crew members were on board, on a scheduled flight from Nashville International Airport to Baltimore/Washington International Airport. The aircraft took off from Nashville at 4:05 pm CDT (5:05 pm EDT) and climbed for about 25 minutes, leveling off at a cruising altitude of approximately 35,000 ft.
At about 5:45 pm EDT, the aircraft experienced a rapid decompression event, causing the cabin altitude warning to be activated in the cockpit, indicating a dangerous drop in cabin pressure. Passenger oxygen masks deployed automatically. The aircraft systems disengaged the autopilot, and the captain began an emergency descent to bring the aircraft down into denser air to prevent passenger hypoxia. The cabin altitude alarm ceased as the aircraft passed through about 9,000 ft.
The flight crew declared an emergency and landed the aircraft safely at Yeager Airport in Kanawha County, West Virginia, near Charleston. After landing, the aircraft was found to have a three-sided hole in the fuselage, 17.4 in long, and between 8.6 to 11.5 in wide, forward of the leading edge of the vertical stabilizer, at the rear end of the aircraft.
Investigation and cause
Investigation
The incident was investigated by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). NTSB review of the cockpit voice recorder records, and post-incident interviews, showed that the flight crew acted appropriately in response to the emergency. The NTSB investigation found that the incident was caused by a metal fatigue crack in the fuselage skin.
The aircraft was delivered to Southwest Airlines in June 1994, and at the time of the incident flight, had accumulated approximately 42,500 takeoff/landing cycles, and 50,500 airframe hours. Highly magnified inspections found that a long metal fatigue crack had developed at the boundary of two different manufacturing processes used by Boeing in creating the fuselage crown skin assembly. Boeing finite element modeling had suggested that stress forces in this boundary region are higher due to differences in stiffness, indicating that a failure was more likely to occur in this area after a certain number of pressurization-depressurization cycles.
Following this incident, on September 3, 2009, Boeing issued a Service Bulletin calling for repetitive external inspections to detect any cracks in this more-vulnerable area of the fuselage skin. The FAA then followed up by issuing an Airworthiness Directive on January 12, 2010, mandating these inspection requirements.
Earlier criticism of the carrier's lax maintenance and inspection practices, for which the airline had been fined $7.5 million in 2008, was quickly echoed.
Text from the Wikipedia article “Southwest Airlines Flight 2294” (revision 1363391774, retrieved 2026-09-18) by its authors, under CC BY-SA 4.0. Extracted as plain text: references, tables, images and some sections are left out. Read the article
NTSB narrative
Flight data recorder data revealed that the airplane took off and climbed for about 25 minutes to an altitude of approximately 35,000 feet, at which point the cabin altitude warning activated, and the captain disengaged the autopilot. Postincident examination of the airplane revealed fatigue cracking of the fuselage skin near the leading edge of the vertical stabilizer adjacent to the rupture. The fatigue cracking penetrated the fuselage skin and created an approximate 18-inch by 12-inch flap in the skin that depressurized the airplane.
The fuselage skin assembly near the leading edge of the vertical stabilizer was manufactured by bonding two full aluminum sheets together, then selectively chemically milling away pockets (bays) of the inner sheet. Continuous fatigue cracks initiated from multiple origins on the inner surface of the skin adjacent to the step formed at the edge of the chemically milled area and propagated outward.
Following the Southwest Airlines (SWA) flight 2294 event, on September 3, 2009, Boeing issued Service Bulletin (SB) 737-53A1301, calling for repetitive external inspections to detect cracks in the fuselage skin along the chemically milled step at stringers S-1 and S-2 right and between BS 827 and BS 847. (The hole from the SWA event was within those boundaries.) If cracks are detected, operators are to contact Boeing for repair instructions. On January 12, 2010, the Federal Aviation Administration issued Airworthiness Directive 2010-01-09, which mandated the inspection requirements in SB 737-53A1301.
Probable cause
Fuselage skin failure due to preexisting fatigue at a chemically milled step.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
Wikipedia article: Southwest Airlines Flight 2294
- Revision
- 1363391774 · 2026-07-09 · retrieved 2026-09-18
- Wikidata
- Q7571207
- Licence
- Text CC BY-SA 4.0, by the article's authors; Wikidata CC0; town positions GeoNames (CC BY 4.0)
NTSB record DCA09FA065
- Event ID
- 20090714X83900
- Case number
- DCA09FA065
- Dataset
- full-current
- Source SHA-256
- 5cf380f0061817c0331a6b2d8cc7e0ee3a79bea469a1001dc5c10e56f35f5ab3
Where each value comes from
- Record
- Wikipedia article "Southwest Airlines Flight 2294" (page 23599233, revision 1363391774); merged with NTSB case DCA09FA065 (events / aircraft)
- Date
- NTSB record DCA09FA065: NTSB narrative opening date, consistent with the API date and time (local date)
- Place and country
- Wikipedia infobox: site; country from Wikidata (P17); country from NTSB record DCA09FA065
- Map position
- NTSB record DCA09FA065: events decimal coordinates
- Aircraft, operator and route
- NTSB record DCA09FA065: aircraft; gaps from Wikipedia infobox: aircraft type, registration, operator, origin and destination; route airports from the linked airport articles' Wikidata codes (OurAirports)
- Operation
- NTSB record DCA09FA065: operated under Part 121: Air Carrier
- Fatalities
- NTSB record DCA09FA065: NTSB API totalFatal
- Ground fatalities
- NTSB record DCA09FA065: events.inj_f_grnd
- Summary
- Wikipedia infobox: summary
Source notes (3)
- One occurrence in two sources, merged: the Wikipedia article "Southwest Airlines Flight 2294" and NTSB case DCA09FA065, matched by the same aircraft registration and date. For this US event the NTSB's values are used where the two differ; each value names its source.
- Filled from the NTSB case API where the bulk record had no value: investigation status. 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.