On December 28, 1978, the aircraft flying this route ran out of fuel while troubleshooting a landing gear problem and crashed in a suburban Portland neighborhood near NE 157th Avenue and East Burnside Street, killing 10 people on board.

This was the last radio transmission from Flight 173 to air traffic control; it crashed into a wooded section of a populated area of suburban Portland, about six nautical miles (11 km; 7 mi) southeast of the airport.

[6][8] The 304th Aerospace Rescue and Recovery Squadron of the Air Force Reserve, based at Portland International Airport, was conducting routine training flights in the area that evening.

Airborne aircraft from this unit (HH-1H Huey helicopters) were immediately diverted to the crash scene and proceeded to transport many of the survivors to local hospitals.

[9] The Safety Board believes that this accident exemplifies a recurring problem—a breakdown in cockpit management and teamwork during a situation involving malfunctions of aircraft systems in flight… Therefore, the Safety Board can only conclude that the flight crew failed to relate the fuel remaining and the rate of fuel flow to the time and distance from the airport, because their attention was directed almost entirely toward diagnosing the landing gear problem.

(Class II, Priority Action, A-79-32)While the totalizer fuel gauge issue might have contributed to the crew's confusion toward the end of the flight, the NTSB report emphasized that the captain should never have allowed such a situation to develop in the first place.

(Class II, Priority Action, X-79-17)This last NTSB recommendation following the incident, addressing flight deck resource management problems, was the genesis for major changes in the way airline crewmembers were trained.

This new type of training addressed behavioral management challenges such as poor crew coordination, loss of situational awareness, and judgment errors frequently observed in aviation accidents.

Within weeks of the NTSB recommendation, NASA held a conference to bring government and industry experts together to examine the potential merits of this training.

[11][15][self-published source] Held responsible for the accident, Captain McBroom lost his pilot's license and retired from United Airlines shortly afterwards.

Family members and passengers who spoke to McBroom at a 1998 reunion of crash survivors reported he was "a broken man" plagued by guilt over his role in the accident.