Mesa Air Group de Havilland DH-8-202 accident
de Havilland DH-8-202 · Accident: on ground/water collision with object
From Telluride Regional Airport (TEX) to Montrose Regional Airport (MTJ)
Narrative check · The NTSB narrative appears to contradict this record's aircraft involved. Values are shown as recorded, not corrected; compare with the narrative.
Event
- NTSB case
- FTW98LA353
- 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
- Visual Meteorological Cond
de Havilland DH-8-202 Narrative disagrees
- Aircraft type
- de Havilland DH-8
- 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
- N449YV
- Operator
- Mesa Air Group
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Telluride Regional Airport (TEX), COTo Montrose Regional Airport (MTJ), Montrose, CO
- 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
- Other
- 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
- Company/operator management › Procedures/directives, inadequate
- Miscellaneous eqpt/furnishings, wheel chocks › Inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
During pre-start preparation, while parked nose in on a 2-degree up-slope, a Bombardier DH-8 aircraft jumped the nose wheel chocks and rolled backwards approximately 70 feet into a parked Beech 1900. The parking brake accumulator had bled off and the crew was in the process of recharging the accumulator when the accident occurred. The investigation revealed that the chocks were too small, and the minimal weight on the nose wheel where the chocks were placed was not sufficient to ensure that nose wheel rolling over the chocks.
Probable cause
The inadequate chocks and inadequate chocking procedures by the operator. Factors were the unavailability of the parking brake and sloping terrain.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record FTW98LA353
- Event ID
- 20001211X10601
- Case number
- FTW98LA353
- Dataset
- historical-pre2008
- Source SHA-256
- 89e2df6d848e7ab3b42e7d7c7a03ff403303057a26ca04c95b3ea67201c3ce74
Source notes (4)
- 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: investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date, which is the same as the UTC date the NTSB stores.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 9bd15fbf58a33a77ef8ba680fe797deb2d4a9e58443ccba41f9056ef8b9c47de; retrieved 2026-09-18T17:06:34.527Z.