Commutair Flight 4479
Beech 1900D · Accident: on ground/water collision with object during landing
From Albany International Airport (ALB) to Adirondack Regional Airport (SLK)
Event
- NTSB case
- IAD98LA023
- Event typeAccident: someone killed or seriously injured, or the aircraft substantially damaged (NTSB definition). Incident: an occurrence that affected or could have affected safety, short of that. Glossary
- Accident
- InvestigationHow far the investigation had got when the record was published: preliminary, ongoing, final or completed. Unknown where the source does not say. Glossary
- Completed
- API-reported fatalities
- 0 · all aircraft and ground
- Ground fatalities
- 0
- OperationWhat kind of flying it was, grouped by the rules it flew under: airline (US Part 121), air taxi and commuter (Part 135), general aviation (Part 91 and similar), military or government. Glossary
- Airline
- WeatherVisual meteorological conditions (VMC): good enough to fly by looking outside. Instrument conditions (IMC): cloud or low visibility, flying by instruments. Glossary
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
Beech 1900D
- Aircraft type
- Beechcraft 1900
- Category
- Airplane
- RegistrationThe aircraft's tail number, such as N12345 or G-ABCD. Registrations are reissued, so the same one years apart can be a different aircraft. Glossary
- N854CA
- Operator
- Commutair
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Albany International Airport (ALB), Albany, NYTo Adirondack Regional Airport (SLK)
- Aircraft age
- Not recorded
- Flight rulesThe regulations the flight operated under: in the US, Part 91 (general aviation), Part 121 (airlines), Part 135 (air taxi and commuter) and others; for flights abroad, the NTSB's coarser commercial or non-commercial code. Glossary
- Part 121: Air Carrier
- Phase of flightThe stage of the flight when things started to go wrong: standing, taxi, takeoff, initial climb, en route, maneuvering, approach or landing. Glossary
- Landing · landing roll
- First occurrenceThe single coded event the NTSB judges best describes what happened (records from 2008 on). Older records name the first occurrence in the sequence instead. Glossary
- On ground/water collision with object
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Airport facilities, runway/landing area condition › Snowbank
- Airport personnel › Airport snow removal, inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
During the night landing on a snow covered runway, the twin-turboprop airplane drifted left into deeper snow, struck a snow bank and came to a stop. The flightcrew had been informed that the runway was cleared to its full width of 150 feet, with 1/4 inch of snow over patches of ice. Post-accident observation of the runway revealed that there were snow banks 2 to 4 feet high on both sides, and snow extended from both sides inward for about 20 feet, at a depth of 4 to 6 inches. A snow bank also extended out from a taxiway approximately 20 feet onto the runway.
Probable cause
The inadequate snow removal from the runway by airport personnel which left a snow bank extending onto the runway.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record IAD98LA023
- Event ID
- 20001211X09454
- Case number
- IAD98LA023
- Dataset
- historical-pre2008
- Source SHA-256
- 89e2df6d848e7ab3b42e7d7c7a03ff403303057a26ca04c95b3ea67201c3ce74
Source notes (5)
- Unreviewed is an editorial label, not an investigation status. API-sourced is not report-checked or human-reviewed. Explicit event totals are used without summing aircraft injury tables; onboard allocation is withheld. Unknown values remain unknown. The operation category is mapped from the NTSB-reported FAR part and has not been reviewed.
- Filled from the NTSB case API where the bulk record had no value: local date, investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 1998-01-21.
- API snapshot SHA-256: d4c0142b202c1686f16c2bc0b3e81fb8320cc22b1af0c89887b6a318023655c5; retrieved 2026-09-18T17:14:24.966Z.
- The NTSB's operator name is blank for N854CA; the operator shown is the name the NTSB records it doing business as.