United Express Flight 7080
de Havilland DHC-8-202 · Incident: on ground/water collision with object during pushback
From Denver International Airport (DEN) to Gunnison Crested Butte Regional Airport (GUC)
Event
- NTSB case
- DEN05IA084
- 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
- Incident
- 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
- Unknown
- 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 DHC-8-202
- Aircraft type
- de Havilland DHC-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
- N454YV
- Operator
- United Express
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Denver International Airport (DEN), Denver, COTo Gunnison Crested Butte Regional Airport (GUC), Gunnison, 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
- Pushback/towing
- 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
- None
Cause areas
- Flightcrew › Procedures/directives, not coordinated/diseminated
- Ground personnel › Procedures/directives, improper
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
During initial pushback, the trainee operating the ground support vehicle, turned the aircraft in the wrong direction, at which time, the supervisor took over control of the vehicle. During the supervisor's attempt to turn the aircraft around, the nose wheels rolled out of the vehicle's wheel cradle and up onto the ground support vehicle. An employee reported she overheard one of the flight crewmembers report to dispatch that the ground personnel was making a sharp turn and the crewmember thought the airplane was going to be pushed back into another airplane. The company which provided the ground support personnel stated the push back operation should have come to a stop and communication should have been conducted between the flight crew and ground crew to resolve all concerns about safe maneuvers.
Probable cause
The improper procedures conducted by the ground personnel and the flight crew's failure to coordinate procedures with the ground personnel during push back operation which resulted in the collision between the ground support vehicle and the airplane. A contributing factor was the inadequate communication between the flight crew and ground crew during the push back operation.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DEN05IA084
- Event ID
- 20050610X00753
- Case number
- DEN05IA084
- 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: investigation status, coordinates, damage. 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: 773ef37be81f1321251f5736d00fa358f780abc271538ee20454d73e877918d6; retrieved 2026-09-18T15:02:14.687Z.
- The NTSB's operator name is blank for N454YV; the operator shown is the name the NTSB records it doing business as.