A 737 Lost Both Engines in a Hailstorm. It Landed on a Strip of Grass

On May 24, 1988, TACA Flight 110, a brand-new Boeing 737-300 with 45 people on board, was descending into New Orleans when it flew into a level 4 thunderstorm. Thirty seconds of heavy hail put out both engines at 16,500 feet. The crew got them relit, but the engines would not accelerate and began to melt from the inside, so they shut them down again. With no runway in reach, Captain Carlos Dárdano, 29 years old and flying with one eye, and First Officer Dionisio Lopez prepared to ditch in a canal, then spotted a grass levee beside it and put the jet down on top of it, in the grounds of NASA's Michoud rocket factory. Everyone walked away. Subscribe to Altitude Alert for a new true aviation story every day:    / @altitudealerttv   This is the story of why hail is not rain, how a radar shadow hid the worst of the storm, what the crew tried in the minutes after the flameout, the 1977 Southern Airways crash that showed how these stories usually end, how Boeing flew the 737 out again from a road built on a WWII runway, and what the engine makers changed so that it would not happen again. CHAPTERS 0:00 Thirty seconds of hail 1:01 A brand-new airplane 1:52 The man in the left seat 2:54 Threading the needle 4:04 Both engines 5:01 Why the fire went out 6:14 The restart 7:22 Eleven years earlier 8:17 Nowhere to land 9:12 The levee 10:30 The rocket factory 11:33 What changed 12:50 The glider's long life DISCLAIMER This video is for documentary and educational purposes. It is based on the US National Transportation Safety Board's findings, the FAA's Lessons Learned summary of the accident, and reporting by Plane & Pilot and others (sources below). Quoted phrases are taken from those sources. Nobody died on Flight 110; this video is made with respect for the passengers and crew who lived through it, and for the people who died on Southern Airways Flight 242 in 1977. The narration voice is AI-generated (synthetic voice). Maps and graphics are schematic; positions and times are approximate. The other images are AI-generated illustrations of places, aircraft and equipment, not real photographs of the people or events in this story. SOURCES FAA Lessons Learned from Civil Aviation Accidents: Boeing 737-300, TACA International Airlines Flight 110, N75356, New Orleans, May 24, 1988 NTSB accident findings, TACA Flight 110 (dual engine flameout, hail/water ingestion, level 4 thunderstorm) Plane & Pilot, "This Incredible Pilot: Carlos Dárdano" (Shalyn Marchetti) NTSB Aircraft Accident Report, Southern Airways Flight 242, New Hope, Georgia, April 4, 1977 Wikipedia, "TACA Flight 110" and "Southern Airways Flight 242", accessed October 2026 #TACA110 #Boeing737 #AviationHistory #AltitudeAlert