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Ameristar Jet Charter Dassault/Sud FAN JET FALCON 20 accident

21 Dec 2008 · Jamestown, NY, United States

Dassault/Sud FAN JET FALCON 20 · Accident: runway excursion during landing

From Tulsa International Airport (TUL) to Chautauqua County-Jamestown Airport (JHW)

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Event

NTSB case
ERA09LA282
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
Charter & commuter
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

Dassault/Sud FAN JET FALCON 20

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
N165TW
Onboard fatalities
Unknown
Route
From Tulsa International Airport (TUL), Tulsa, OKTo Chautauqua County-Jamestown Airport (JHW), Jamestown, NY
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 135: Air Taxi & Commuter
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
Landing · landing roll
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
Runway excursion
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

  • Aircraft › Aircraft oper/perf/capability
  • Environmental issues › Physical environment

Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.

NTSB narrative

The co-pilot was performing a nighttime approach and landing to runway 25. No runway condition reports were received by the flight crew while airborne, and a NOTAM was in effect, stating, “thin loose snow over patchy thin ice.” After landing, the co-pilot called out that the airplane was sliding and the wheel brakes were ineffective. The captain took the controls, activated the air brakes, and instructed the co-pilot to deploy the drag chute. The crew could not stop the airplane in the remaining runway distance and the airplane overran the runway by approximately 100 feet. After departing the runway end, the landing gear contacted a snow berm that was the result of earlier plowing. The captain turned the airplane around and taxied to the ramp. Subsequent inspection of the airplane revealed a fractured nose gear strut and buckling of the fuselage. The spring-loaded drag chute extractor cap activated, but the parachute remained in its tail cone container. Both flight crewmembers reported that the runway was icy at the time of the accident and braking action was “nil.” The airport manager reported that when the airplane landed, no airport staff were on duty and had not been for several hours. He also reported that when the airport staff left for the evening, the runway conditions were adequate. The runway had been plowed and sanded approximately 20 hours prior to the accident, sanded two more times during the day, and no measurable precipitation was recorded within that time frame. The reason that the drag chute failed to deploy was not determined.

Probable cause

The inability to stop the airplane on the remaining runway because of icy runway conditions. A factor was the failure of the drag chute to properly deploy.

Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset

Sources

NTSB record ERA09LA282
Event ID
20090505X41523
Case number
ERA09LA282
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, 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: 9ebb8e65d5c708c0b21bac5fc0b3935550e778c5d8afa6cd27ae722df4119b5d; retrieved 2026-09-15T11:01:11.527Z.