Southern Air Flight 996
Boeing 747-228F · Accident: on ground/water collision with object while standing
From Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport (PANC) to Dallas Fort Worth International Airport (DFW)
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC07LA008
- 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
- 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
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
Boeing 747-228F
- Aircraft type
- Boeing 747
- 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
- N752SA
- Operator
- Southern Air
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport (PANC), Anchorage, AKTo Dallas Fort Worth International Airport (DFW), Dallas, TX
- 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
- Standing · engine(s) not operating
- 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
- Ground personnel › Clearance, not maintained
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight crew departed on an instrument flight rules (IFR) non-scheduled domestic cargo flight under Title 14, CFR Part 121. When the cabin failed to pressurize during departure, the airplane returned to the airport. An FAA inspector who examined the airplane reported that maintenance personnel found a penetrating gouge in the right lower portion of the fuselage between the wing and tail, near the cargo door. The inspector indicated that the gouge was 18 inches long, 1 to 2 inches wide, with other, shallower surface skin damage about 3 feet long, and that the damage was consistent with the size and shape of the counter-balance weight on the truck used to deice the airplane.
Probable cause
The failure of the deicing truck crew to maintain sufficient distance from the parked airplane during deicing, which resulted in a collision and substantial damage to the airplane.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC07LA008
- Event ID
- 20070105X00013
- Case number
- ANC07LA008
- 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, coordinates. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2006-12-24.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 97afa20aff9fe0ec43c2db822da39ed5dceec487703c3ea4b13e357004ca8b93; retrieved 2026-09-18T14:48:35.383Z.
- The NTSB's operator name is blank for N752SA; the operator shown is the name the NTSB records it doing business as.