TACA Flight One-Ten - The Deadstick Seven Thirty-Seven That Landed on a New Orleans Levee

On May 24, 1988, a TACA International Airlines Boeing 737-300 lost both engines to hail ingestion while descending toward New Orleans and landed without thrust on a grassy levee in Kenner, Louisiana. All 45 people aboard walked away without serious injury. It remains one of the most remarkable demonstrations of airmanship in commercial aviation history.

Who Was TACA Flight 110?

TACA International Airlines was a Central American carrier based in San Salvador, El Salvador, operating routes connecting Belize City, Guatemala City, San José, Miami, Houston, and New Orleans. The airline was a solid, if low-profile, operation serving commerce and travel across a region that rarely made aviation headlines.

Flight 110 that afternoon was a routine leg from Belize City’s Philip Goldson International Airport to New Orleans. The aircraft was a Boeing 737-300, one of the newer Classic-series jets, powered by CFM56-3 high-bypass turbofan engines - a detail that becomes central to understanding what happened. The passenger load was 38, and with crew, there were 45 souls aboard.

The Weather That Started Everything

The convective system building over southeastern Louisiana that May afternoon was not something the crew could thread around. Towering cumulus, embedded thunderstorms, solid radar returns - and it was positioned directly on the approach end. The flight deck crew, Captain Carlos Dardano and First Officer Beto Dovis, attempted to navigate gaps in the weather. The weather didn’t offer any.

They flew into heavy rain. Then the hail started.

Why the CFM56-3 Engines Both Failed

The CFM56-3 was a relatively new powerplant in 1988 - a significant advancement in fuel efficiency for the narrowbody market. But the industry was still accumulating operational experience with its design characteristics, and one of those characteristics became critical that afternoon.

The engine’s fan and compressor geometry, engineered for high efficiency with tight tolerances, was vulnerable to simultaneous large-scale ingestion of water and hail. That combination could trigger compressor stalls - disruptions to the smooth airflow through the engine that combustion depends on. Severe enough stalls, and the fire goes out.

The left engine flamed out. Then the right. Both engines, nearly simultaneously.

In the cabin, passengers felt the shift before they could name it. The constant background hum of engine noise - the sound airline travelers learn to filter out - was gone. On the flight deck, there was no time to process it. Dardano and Dovis went immediately to restart procedures.

The 737’s Glide Ratio Is Not Forgiving

The Boeing 737 without thrust has a glide ratio of roughly 17:1 - seventeen feet forward for every foot of descent. In the abstract, that sounds manageable. In a 140,000-pound jet descending through weather with the altimeter continuously unwinding, it concentrates the mind considerably.

The APU (auxiliary power unit) was still running, providing some electrical power and residual hydraulic pressure - enough to extend the landing gear on gravity extension and maintain control authority. But the APU produces no thrust. For every practical purpose, the aircraft had become the heaviest and least aerodynamic glider most pilots will ever encounter.

Dardano now faced the question commercial pilots train for theoretically and almost never confront in reality: where do we put it?

Why New Orleans Made This Harder

New Orleans is not a forgiving emergency landing environment. The city sits largely below sea level on a river delta. The terrain around the airport is suburban development, drainage canals, waterways, and flood-control infrastructure. The Mississippi River is nearby. Lake Pontchartrain is nearby. Interstate 10 cuts through the area to the north. None of those are where you point a 737.

But there are levees.

Broad, grassy earthen flood-control levees run through the terrain around the airport and the Kenner district to the west. Not a runway - not close to a runway - but flat, firm ground that, in theory, might catch a 737 and let it stop.

There was no list of options being weighed. There was one option.

The Landing on the Levee

With gear extended on gravity and residual hydraulic pressure, Dardano flew the aircraft to numbers. Airspeed control. Configuration. The airplane doesn’t know what’s below it - the pilot’s job is to deliver it to the right piece of ground at the right speed. He flew every foot of that approach.

Captain Carlos Dardano set a Boeing 737 down on a grassy levee near Kenner, Louisiana.

Not on a runway. Not on a taxiway. On grass, in weather that had stripped him of both engines. All 45 people aboard walked away. Not one suffered a serious injury.

The Detail That Stops the Room

Captain Dardano had lost a leg in an accident years before May 24, 1988. He flew on a prosthetic limb.

The pilot who deadsticked a twin-engine jet airliner onto a Louisiana levee and walked 45 people away did it on one natural leg.

The Engine Change - On the Levee

The story didn’t end with the landing.

When investigators arrived and Boeing and TACA engineering teams assessed the situation, someone asked whether the engines - which hadn’t been destroyed by fire or catastrophic failure, just overwhelmed and shut down - could be replaced on site.

In a proper maintenance environment, a heavy engine change on a commercial jet requires specific tooling, ground support equipment, hangar facilities, and extensive quality control documentation. It’s a defined process, but it demands the right setup.

They did it in the field.

Replacement CFM56-3 engines were brought in. Ground support equipment was rigged in the grass. The old engines came off. New engines went on. Over several days, a grassy levee in Kenner, Louisiana, functioned as an open-air engine change facility. When the new powerplants were tested and cleared, a ferry crew climbed into that 737 and flew it off the levee under its own power.

Short-field departure. Grass surface. An airplane that arrived without engines left under its own.

What Changed After TACA 110

The NTSB investigated thoroughly. The FAA examined the CFM56-3’s ingestion characteristics in combined water and hail conditions. CFM International and the airframers addressed the vulnerability. Engine certification standards were revised. Crew training for dual-engine failure scenarios was sharpened across the industry.

That is how aviation gets safer - not by assuming nothing will go wrong, but by paying honest attention when it does. The aircraft that sat in that field in Kenner flew for years after repairs were complete. Captain Dardano continued flying.

Why This Matters for Pilots

The dual-engine failure checklists exist. The procedures are solid. But there is a meaningful distance between running those items in a simulator and running them in a real airplane while the altimeter unwinds and terrain options start becoming personal.

What Dardano and Dovis demonstrated on that afternoon was not luck. It was training, discipline, experience, and a refusal to stop flying the aircraft until it was fully stopped on the ground. The best emergency outcomes in aviation share that thread. The mental work - briefing the terrain off the departure end, knowing the longest flat surface within glide distance, running through the scenario before it ever happens - is the foundation the performance is built on.

TACA 110 is publicly documented in the NTSB accident report and in contemporary reporting from Aviation Week & Space Technology. The photographs of the 737 sitting in that Louisiana field, engine change underway, are worth finding.

Key Takeaways

On May 24, 1988, TACA Flight 110 lost both CFM56-3 engines to simultaneous water and hail ingestion while approaching New Orleans, leaving the 737 a powerless glider.
Captain Carlos Dardano and First Officer Beto Dovis executed a successful deadstick landing on a grassy levee near Kenner, Louisiana, with all 45 people aboard walking away uninjured.
The CFM56-3’s vulnerability to combined water/hail ingestion was a known but underappreciated characteristic in 1988; the accident directly drove improvements in engine certification and dual-engine failure training industry-wide.
Replacement engines were installed in the field on the levee, and the aircraft was subsequently flown off the grass under its own power - one of the more improbable maintenance operations in commercial aviation history.
Captain Dardano accomplished the landing on a prosthetic limb, having lost a leg in a prior accident.