AVAir Flight 3378
1988 aviation accident
AVAir Flight 3378 was a scheduled flight from Raleigh–Durham International Airport to Richmond International Airport operated by Air Virginia that crashed after takeoff from Raleigh-Durham International Airport late on the night of February 19, 1988. All 12 people on board were killed in the accident.
Accident sequence
The weather at the time of the accident included a low ceiling and low visibility. The flight crew consisted of Captain Walter R. Cole Jr., 38, and First Officer Kathleen P. Digan, 28. The aircraft did not carry a cockpit voice recorder (CVR) or a flight data recorder (FDR) and was not required to at the time.
AVAir Flight 3378 took off from Raleigh–Durham International Airport at 21:25 local time and climbed to a height of 300 feet (91 m). Shortly after, the last transmission from the aircraft to the air traffic control was heard. The aircraft maintained an appropriate climb speed but at an excessive rate of turn, 40 to 45 degrees; a standard turn rate would have been 22 degrees. Due to the turn, the plane started to descend. The aircraft then struck the water in a reservoir 100 feet (30 m) from the shoreline, at a point 5100 feet west of runway 23R. The wreckage then continued onto land and into a forest.
“AVAir Flight 3378” enters the record as 1988 aviation accident. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what AVAir, Flight and aviation can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4655029. Authority coordinates are 35.869, -78.810. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1988.
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This entry incorporates text from “AVAir Flight 3378” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.