Frontier Airlines Flight 659
Airbus Industrie A319-111 · Incident: on ground/water encounter with weather during initial climb
From Denver International Airport (DEN) to San Francisco International Airport (SFO)
Event
- NTSB case
- DEN07IA069
- 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
Airbus Industrie A319-111
- Aircraft type
- Airbus A319
- 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
- N927FR
- Operator
- Frontier Airlines
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Denver International Airport (DEN), Denver, COTo San Francisco International Airport (SFO), San Francisco, CA
- 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
- Initial climb
- 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 encounter with weather
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Minor
Cause areas
- Window › Foreign object damage
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
According to the captain, the airplane had just departed and was making a turn to a heading of 270 degrees when they noticed the first officer's windshield cracking and beginning to arc. The captain alerted Air Traffic Control that they were returning to the airport and noticed that his windshield was also cracking, but not arcing. The first officer's windscreen stopped arcing and the flight crew landed the airplane without further incident. During the course of the afternoon, 14 airplanes experienced 26 fractured windshields. One flight crew reported that during the landing roll they "heard a loud thump" and observed the first officer's window "spider web." They did not observe anything impacting the windscreen. Another flight crew reported taxiing through "dirt and dust being blown around." Examination of the windshields revealed that the impact markings on all 26 windshields were the result of impact with foreign object debris (FOD). No pre-impact anomalies were noted with any of the windshields. Winds at the time of the event were reported as 280 degrees to 030 degrees with sustained winds between 28 and 36 knots. Wind gusts as high as 44 knots were recorded.
Probable cause
Fracturing of the aircraft windscreens due to impact with foreign object debris. Contributing to the event was the high, gusty surface winds.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DEN07IA069
- Event ID
- 20070313X00281
- Case number
- DEN07IA069
- 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, coordinates. 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: c1715c2d5cb0311cb0fd5f355359036e0aab8d74eddf6c847fcd685ff234c3cd; retrieved 2026-09-18T14:47:07.536Z.