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LIT-1371: Aircraft Accident Report: United Airlines, Inc., McDonnell-Douglas DC-8-61, N8082U, Portland, Oregon, December 28, 1978

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Properties5
StatusActive — read 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1086) from the FAA-hosted scan of NTSB-AAR-79-7 (a U.S. government work; the analysis and findings pages read from images where the OCR fails; the CVR transcript skimmed). Worth holding as the founding document of the CRM case: the crew had the fuel quantity, no one was assigned to watch it against time, the others' concerns stayed comments, and the Board's recommendation X-79-17 asked for "participative management for captains and assertiveness training for other cockpit crewmembers", a reform of how command takes input that leaves command in place. It does not find that the other crew members knew the fuel was running out. Registered from the owner's exchange of 2026-10-22, "Graph Learning Applications".
Version2
Tagsoperations-research, agency
ReportsCASE-127 — United 173 and Crew Resource Management: a crew whose concern about the fuel did not reach the captain as a demand to act, and the training that followed, which asked for participative captains and assertive crews
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-1086 — NTSB — United Airlines Flight 173, Portland, 1978

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National Transportation Safety Board (1979). Aircraft Accident Report: United Airlines, Inc., McDonnell-Douglas DC-8-61, N8082U, Portland, Oregon, December 28, 1978. NTSB-AAR-79-7, adopted 7 June 1979. https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/2022-11/AAR79-07.pdf.

Read on 2026-10-22 in NOTE-1086 (the CVR transcript skimmed).

Why this is here

The owner proposed the history behind Crew Resource Management as a case (U25). This accident is its standard starting point. The case is CASE-127.

From the reading, 2026-10-22. The report supports the case’s facts and its probable and contributing causes. It does not support the case title’s “a crew that knew the fuel was running out”: the Board finds the crew aware of the quantity at various times, finds no monitoring of it against time, and leaves open whether the first officer and flight engineer grasped the criticality. Its recommendation X-79-17 is the earliest official statement of the reform CASE-127 calls “authority without abolishing command”. See NOTE-1086 for its bearing on CLAIM-349, CLAIM-422 and CLAIM-424.

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