1988 TACA Douglas DC-6 accident in Louisiana
Hispanola Airways Douglas DC-6A · The 1988 TACA Douglas DC-6 accident in Louisiana occurred on 20 July 1988
From El Salvador International Airport Saint Óscar Arnulfo Romero y Galdámez (SAL) to Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport (NEO)
Event
- NTSB case
- FTW88FA136
- 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
- 3 · all aircraft and ground
- Ground fatalities
- 0
- Occupants
- Unknown
- Survivors
- 0
- 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
- Visual Meteorological Cond
Douglas DC-6A
- Aircraft type
- Douglas DC-6
- 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
- N33VX
- Operator
- Hispanola Airways
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From El Salvador International Airport Saint Óscar Arnulfo Romero y Galdámez (SAL)To Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport (NEO), New Orleans, LA
- 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 129: Foreign
- 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
- First occurrenceThe 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
- Total loss of engine power (non-mechanical)
- Also codedOther events the NTSB coded in the sequence, such as a wire strike after a loss of power. Flight Findings uses them for its kinds of event. Glossary
- Fuel exhaustion
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Destroyed
Cause areas
- Fluid, fuel › Exhaustion
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
From the Wikipedia article
The 1988 TACA Douglas DC-6 accident in Louisiana occurred on 20 July 1988. On that day, a TACA International Airlines Douglas DC-6/C-118A cargo aircraft on an international cargo flight from San Salvador to New Orleans crashed after an emergency landing became necessary due to fuel starvation. Unlike on Taca International Airways Flight 110 two months earlier, the planned emergency landing on a levee near Golden Meadow, Louisiana did not succeed on this flight, so that the aircraft was destroyed and all three crew members died.
Accident sequence
At departure in San Salvador the aircraft was fuelled with fuel for seven hours of flight time. The takeoff and the flight proceeded routinely until, four hours and 20 minutes after takeoff, engines 3 (right inner) and 4 (right outer) suddenly failed due to fuel starvation. The pilots still managed to reach the US mainland and carried out an emergency landing near Golden Meadows in Louisiana. During the emergency landing the landing gear clipped a levee, the wing struck the ground and the aircraft skidded into a drainage ditch. All three crew members were killed in the accident. Their bodies were recovered from the water on 22 July 1988.
Investigation and cause
Cause
The National Transportation Safety Board took over the investigation into the cause of the accident. The investigators found that there was no fuel in the tanks and were also unable to detect any fuel leakage at the accident site. Initially no cause for the fuel loss could be determined, but about a month after the accident an employee of the aircraft operator stated that he had discovered an open drain valve in the engine nacelle of engine No. 4 (right outer). A metallurgical examination revealed that the valve had been open for a long time. During the takeoff, the taxiing and the takeoff, none of the employees of San Salvador airport noticed a fuel loss. In flight the crew had no access to the valve. The investigators found indications that engines No. 1 (left outer), 2 (left inner) and three (right inner) were not operating at the time of impact. All the crossfeed valves between the tanks were open. Although ethanol was found in the bodies of the captain and the first officer, the investigators attributed this finding to post-mortem decomposition processes.
Translated into English with AI assistance from the German Wikipedia article “Flugunfall einer Douglas DC-6 der TACA in Louisiana 1988” (revision 250883931, retrieved 2026-09-19) by its authors, under CC BY-SA 4.0. Extracted as plain text: references, tables, images and some sections are left out; the translation may contain errors, and long articles were cut to their first 700 words. Read the article
NTSB narrative
AFTER ABT 4.3 HRS ON AN OVERWATER FLT, THE CREW RPRTD THEY HAD 15 MIN OF FUEL REMAINING. SUBSEQUENTLY, 3 OF 4 ENGS LOST PWR FM FUEL EXHAUSTION. DRG AN EMERG LNDG, THE ACFT HIT A LEVEE & WAS EXTENSIVELY DMGD. MOST OF THE WRECKAGE CAME TO REST IN A DAINAGE CANAL. BODIES OF THE CREW WERE RCVRD FM THE WATER ON 7/22/88. DRG AN INV, NO FUEL WAS FND IN THE FUEL TANKS & NO FUEL SPILL WAS EVIDENT. RECORDS SHOWED THE ACFT HAD DEPD EL SALVADOR WITH 7 HRS OF FUEL. NO REASON FOR THE LOSS OF 2.7 HRS OF FUEL WAS VERIFIED; BUT ABT 1 MONTH AFTER THE ACDNT, AN EMPLOYEE OF THE OPERATOR RPRTD FINDING AN OPENDRAIN VLV IN THE WRECKAGE, INSIDE THE #4 ENG NACELLE. A METALLURGICAL EXAM INDCD THE VLV HAD BEEN IN AN OPEN PSN FOR AN EXTDD TIME. NO GND PSNL SAW FUEL DRAINING FM THE ACFT DRG START, TAXI OR TKOF. THE CREW HAD NO CTL OF THE VLV IN FLT. THERE WAS EVIDENCE THE #1, #2 & #3 ENGS WERE NOT PROVIDING PWR DRG IMPACT. ALL X-FEED VLV CTLS WERE FND IN X-FEED PSNS. ETHANOL WAS FND IN THE PLT'S & COPLT'S BLOOD, BUT THERE WAS EVIDENCE THAT IT WAS THE RESULTED OF POSTMORTEM CHANGES.
Verbatim NTSB analysis from the NTSB dataset
Sources
German Wikipedia article: Flugunfall einer Douglas DC-6 der TACA in Louisiana 1988
- Translation
- Into English with AI assistance; names of linked operators and aircraft types from Wikidata. It may contain errors.
- Revision
- 250883931 · 2024-12-02 · retrieved 2026-09-19
- Wikidata
- Q131341111
- Licence
- Text CC BY-SA 4.0, by the article's authors; Wikidata CC0; town positions GeoNames (CC BY 4.0)
NTSB record FTW88FA136
- Event ID
- 20001213X26237
- Case number
- FTW88FA136
- Dataset
- historical-pre2008
- Source SHA-256
- 89e2df6d848e7ab3b42e7d7c7a03ff403303057a26ca04c95b3ea67201c3ce74
Where each value comes from
- Record
- de Wikipedia article "Flugunfall einer Douglas DC-6 der TACA in Louisiana 1988" (page 13292490, revision 250883931), translated into English with AI assistance; merged with NTSB case FTW88FA136 (events / aircraft)
- Date
- NTSB record FTW88FA136: NTSB API eventDate, eventTimeUtc and eventTimeUtcOffsetHours (local date)
- Place and country
- Wikipedia infobox: site; country from NTSB record FTW88FA136
- Map position
- NTSB record FTW88FA136: events decimal coordinates
- Aircraft, operator and route
- NTSB record FTW88FA136: 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 FTW88FA136: operated under Part 129: Foreign
- Fatalities
- NTSB record FTW88FA136: NTSB API totalFatal
- Ground fatalities
- NTSB record FTW88FA136: NTSB API ongroundFatal
- Summary
- Wikipedia article lead
Source notes (4)
- One occurrence in two sources, merged: the Wikipedia article "1988 TACA Douglas DC-6 accident in Louisiana" and NTSB case FTW88FA136, 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: local date, investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 1988-07-21.
- The NTSB's operator name is blank for N33VX; the operator shown is the name the NTSB records it doing business as.