The Captain of a Southwest Airlines flight from Las Vegas to Reno was incapacitated just as the aircraft was taking off from Harry Reid International Airport, when a display screen dropped on his head as the Boeing 737 was in its initial ascent.
The accident, first reported by the Aviation Herald, occurred on April 8 but is only now coming to light after details of the incident started to emerge from accident investigators.
The display screen in question is known as a HUD, which stands for Heads Up Display – a thin transparent screen that sits at or just above eye level, providing critical flight-related information, like airspeed and altitude, without the pilot needing to glance down at the various screens and terminals in the cockpit.
Although the actual screen is pretty lightweight, the whole unit is relatively hefty.
In this case, it’s understood that the Captain suffered a mild concussion, and a wheelchair had to be requested to have him removed from the aircraft.
Southwest flight WN-568 departed Las Vegas Airport around 2:20 pm on April 8 but only climbed to a maximum altitude of around 7,000 feet, as the First Officer declared an emergency and diverted straight back to Las Vegas.
The concussion was said to be so bad that the Captain had started vomiting before he was taken away by emergency medical personnel.
Despite what might seem like a serious incident, Southwest was able to find a replacement Captain and clear the aircraft for departure just an hour and a half after it had landed back in Las Vegas.
In December 2025, accident investigators opened a probe into an incident involving a Malta Air Boeing 737 in which a sun visor fell from the ceiling of the cockpit and allegedly managed to hit the fuel cut-off switch in such a way that it disabled one of the engines.
The flight from Krakow in Poland to Milan, Italy, was being operated by a four-and-a-half-year-old Boeing 737MAX-8200 (registration: 9H-VUE), which is a high-capacity variant of Boeing’s standard 737MAX-8.
At around 1:10 pm on December 8, the aircraft took off from Krakow Airport, but within minutes, the pilots declared a so-called PAN PAN emergency because one of the two engines had suddenly shut down while the aircraft was still in its initial climb at just 8,000 feet.
According to the Aviation Herald, investigators are looking at whether a sun visor fitted to the cockpit windscreen could have been the cause of the accident. One theory is that the sun visor was “torn off” during takeoff, and it impacted one of the engine start levers and cut off the fuel supply to the affected engine.
Thankfully, the pilots were able to successfully restart the engine, and the plane continued on to Milan, where it landed without further incident.
Boeing said it had “significant interest” in the investigation, while Ryanair (which is the parent company of Malta Air) declined to comment on the ongoing probe.
