Frontier Airlines Flight 820
Airbus A319-111 · Incident: birdstrike en route
From Kansas City International Airport (MCI) to Denver International Airport (DEN)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN10IA053
- 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 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
- N924FR
- Operator
- Frontier Airlines
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Kansas City International Airport (MCI), Kansas City, MOTo Denver International Airport (DEN), Denver, 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
- En route · climb to cruise
- 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
- Birdstrike
- 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
- Environmental issues › Physical environment
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane struck a flock of birds shortly after takeoff as it was climbing through 4,260 feet at 252 knots. The right engine spooled down to flight idle. When the crew attempted to advance the throttle, there were a series of compressor stalls. Passengers said they saw fireballs being ejected from the engine. The crew declared an emergency, returned to the airport, and landed uneventfully. The bird remains were identified as Lesser Snow Goose (Chen caerulescens caerulescens) with an average weight of 5.3 pounds.
Probable cause
The in-flight engine ingestion of one or more Lesser Snow Geese (Chen caerulescens caerulescens).
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN10IA053
- Event ID
- 20091117X55556
- Case number
- CEN10IA053
- 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: local date, investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2009-11-15.
- API snapshot SHA-256: bd492ff3efe4fdc626d9fb1bc016e55b95d082549f78d2b34103516be4468ac9; retrieved 2026-09-15T13:29:58.103Z.