Northwest Airlines Flight 255
1987 crash of an MD-80 aircraft in Detroit, Michigan, USA
On Sunday, August 16, 1987, a McDonnell Douglas MD-82 operating as Northwest Airlines Flight 255 crashed shortly after takeoff from Detroit Metropolitan Airport at about 20:46 EDT (00:46 UTC August 17). All six crew members and 148 of the 149 passengers, as well as two people on the ground, were killed.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) determined that the probable cause of the accident was the flight crew's failure to set flaps and slats for takeoff. A contributing factor was a lack of power to the aircraft's central aural warning system, which prevented the takeoff warning system from providing an aural alert to the crew of the improper takeoff configuration.
Background
Aircraft
The aircraft involved was a twin-engine McDonnell Douglas MD-82 (registration number N312RC), a derivative of the McDonnell Douglas DC-9 and part of the McDonnell Douglas MD-80 series of aircraft. The jet was manufactured in 1981, entered service with Republic Airlines, and was acquired by Northwest Airlines in its merger with Republic in 1986. The aircraft was powered by two Pratt & Whitney JT8D-217 turbofan engines.
Crew
Two pilots and four flight attendants crewed Flight 255. The captain was 57-year-old John R. Maus from Las Vegas, Nevada, and the first officer was 35-year-old David J. Dodds from Galena, Illinois. Maus had logged 20,859 flight hours in his career, with 1,359 on the McDonnell Douglas MD-80.
“Northwest Airlines Flight 255” enters the record as 1987 crash of an MD-80 aircraft in Detroit, Michigan, USA. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Northwest, Airlines and Flight can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1459010. The first chronological checks are 1987, 1981 and 1986.
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This entry incorporates text from “Northwest Airlines Flight 255” 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.