Airtran Airways Flight 808
Incident: air traffic event on approach
Event
- NTSB case
- OPS09IA002
- 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
- Event fatalities
- Unknown
- 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
- Not recorded
Unknown aircraft
- 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
- Unknown
- Operator
- AirTran Airways
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo not recorded
- 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
- Approach · IFR final approach
- Defining eventThe 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
- Air traffic event
- 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
- Personnel issues › Psychological
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
An operational error occurred at Tampa Terminal Radar Approach Control that resulted in a loss of required separation between AirTran Airways flight 808 (TRS808) and Berry Aviation flight 510 (BYA510). TRS808 was operating as a scheduled 14 Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) Part 121 passenger flight between Pittsburgh International Airport, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Tampa International Airport, Tampa Florida (TPA). BYA510 was operating as a 14 CFR Part 135 air taxi flight from MacDill Air Force Base (MCF), Tampa, Florida, to Jacksonville Naval Air Station (NIP), Jacksonville, Florida. BYA510 departed southbound from MCF beneath the final approach course for runway 36 at TPA. The pilot was erroneously cleared to climb to 5,000 feet in an area where local procedures required that aircraft level at 1,600 feet in order to avoid conflicts with aircraft landing at TPA. The controller stated that he was searching for BYA510's flight progress strip immediately before the flight passed about 200-250 feet below TRS808, after the pilot of TRS808 responded to a Traffic Collision Alerting System resolution advisory directing a climb to resolve the conflict. There were no injuries or damage reported to either aircraft. Following the incident, TRS808 landed uneventfully at TPA and BYA510 continued its flight to NIP.
Probable cause
The controller's issuance of an improper climb clearance to the pilot of Berry Aviation flight 510. Contributing to the incident was the controller's distraction while he searched for a misplaced flight progress strip.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record OPS09IA002
- Event ID
- 20090225X83224
- Case number
- OPS09IA002
- Dataset
- full-current
- Source SHA-256
- 5cf380f0061817c0331a6b2d8cc7e0ee3a79bea469a1001dc5c10e56f35f5ab3
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, 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: 84ef8007db685938728f908471ee5c8f778383817fafed40586490ed04ecef1e; retrieved 2026-09-15T10:47:07.136Z.