Delta Air Lines Flight 1141 saw 177x more Wikipedia readers than usual

What this article is

Delta Air Lines Flight 1141 was a scheduled domestic passenger flight between Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, Texas, and Salt Lake City International Airport, Utah. On August 31, 1988, the flight, operated by a Boeing 727-200 series aircraft, crashed during takeoff at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, resulting in 14 deaths and 76 injuries among the 108 on board. The cause of the crash was the crew's failure to configure the airplane's flaps or slats for takeoff. The aircraft's take-off warning system (TOWS) also malfunctioned and failed to warn the crew of the problem. Recordings from the cockpit voice recorder revealed that the crew had improperly engaged in casual conversation on various matters unrelated to the operation of the flight, which may have distracted them from properly performing their duties. The recordings, which were broadcast repeatedly by the press, proved so embarrassing that a law was subsequently passed to prohibit the release of cockpit voice recordings. Since the passage of that law, only written transcripts have been released rather than the voice recordings themselves.

Summary text from the Wikipedia article "Delta Air Lines Flight 1141", available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the full article.

Where editors were working

Wikipedia editors made 1 edit to this article on 2026-05-06, concentrated in these sections. This is evidence about the surge, not an explanation of it.

• Crew and airline performance

How this was measured

Views are Wikimedia's own pageview counts for en.wikipedia, filtered to agent=user so automated traffic is excluded. The baseline is the median of the previous 60 days, which is used instead of the mean so that an earlier surge cannot flatten a later one. The multiple is the day's views divided by that median.