On August 16, 1987, a McDonnell Douglas MD-82, operating as Northwest Airlines Flight 255, crashed shortly after takeoff from Detroit Metropolitan Airport, about 8:46 pm EDT (00:46 UTC August 17), resulting in the deaths of all six crew members and 148 of the 149 passengers, along with two people on the ground.

Other than a minor problem taxiing to the arrival gate, the flight from Saginaw to Detroit was uneventful.

At roughly 20:32 EDT, Flight 255 departed the gate in Detroit with 149 passengers (including 21 children) and six crew members.

[1]: 1, 7 At 20:34:40, the pushback tug was disconnected from the aircraft and at 20:34:50, the controller cleared Flight 255 to taxi to runway number 3C (center).

In the process of taxiing, Flight 255 missed the required turn, so Dodds contacted the ground controller and received instructions on how to proceed to runway 3C, and also to switch to 119.45 MHz.

The controller advised that a 3-minute delay was needed to allow the wake turbulence from the previous aircraft that had taken off to dissipate.

[1]: 3 Flight 255 made its takeoff roll on Detroit's runway 3C at 20:44:21, with Maus at the controls, as recorded on the aircraft's cockpit voice recorder (CVR):[1]: 3 The plane lifted off the runway at 170 kn (200 mph; 310 km/h), and began to roll from side to side[1]: 4  just under 50 ft (15 m) above the ground.

The MD-82's rate of climb was greatly reduced as a result of the flaps not being extended,[1]: 67  and about 2,760 ft (840 m) past the end of runway 3C, the plane's left wing struck a light pole in an airport rental car lot.

[citation needed] Two motorists on nearby Middlebelt Road also perished and five people on the ground were injured, one seriously.

The sole survivor of the crash was Cecelia Cichan,[11] a four-year-old girl from Tempe, Arizona, who was returning home alongside her mother, Paula, father, Michael, and a six-year-old brother, David, after visiting relatives in Pennsylvania.

Eyewitnesses stated that Flight 255's takeoff roll was longer than usual and that the aircraft took off at a steeper angle.

Three possible conditions would have caused power to be interrupted at the P-40 circuit breaker—the circuit breaker was intentionally opened by either the flight crew or maintenance personnel, the circuit breaker tripped because of a transient overload and the flight crew did not detect the open circuit breaker, or the circuit breaker did not allow current to flow to the CAWS power supply and did not annunciate the condition by tripping.The NTSB published its final report on May 10, 1988, in which it concluded that the accident was caused by pilot error:[1]: 68 The National Transportation Safety Board determines that the probable cause of the accident was the flight crew's failure to use the taxi checklist to ensure that the flaps and slats were extended for takeoff.

They were changed to Flights 260 and 261 beginning in September 1987 until the company merged with Delta Air Lines in early 2010.

[22] The memorial has a dove with a ribbon in its beak reading, "Their spirit still lives on ..."; below it are the names of those who perished in the accident.

[23] Also, a marker stone is located at the General Motors Proving Ground in Milford, MI, in memory of the 14 GM employees and seven family members who were killed in the accident.

[26] The accident of Northwest Airlines Flight 255 was covered in 2010 in "Alarming Silence", a season-9 episode of the internationally syndicated Canadian TV documentary series Mayday.

Higgins, then of The Charlotte Observer, and fellow NASCAR beat reporters Steve Waid and Gary McCredie (of Grand National Scene) arrived at a hotel near the Detroit Metropolitan Airport awaiting a Monday morning flight to Charlotte, North Carolina, after finishing coverage of the Champion Spark Plug 400 that afternoon at Michigan International Speedway, and were witnesses to the plane crash.

For years, Higgins feared the August NASCAR weekend after this crash, noting how he was a witness on Middlebelt Road.

[30] In her 2018 memoir This Will Only Hurt a Little, Busy Philipps mentioned that her friend Megan Briggs died the summer going into 5th grade on this plane crash.