Air Canada Embraer ERJ190 100IGW incident
Embraer ERJ190 100IGW · Incident: runway incursion (vehicle, aircraft or person) while taxiing
From Denver International Airport (KDEN) to Montreal / Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport (CYUL)
Event
- NTSB case
- OPS11IA273
- 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
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
Embraer ERJ190 100IGW
- Aircraft type
- Embraer ERJ190
- 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
- C-FHKA
- Operator
- Air Canada
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Denver International Airport (KDEN), Denver, COTo Montreal / Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport (CYUL), Montreal-Trudea
- 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
- Taxi · into takeoff position
- 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 incursion (vehicle, aircraft or person)
- 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 › Action/decision
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
A runway incursion occurred when an aviation operations vehicle, operated as the lead vehicle for a snow removal team, entered an active runway without clearance as the airplane was about to begin its takeoff roll. The airplane's crew noticed the headlights of the vehicle approaching on the runway and did not initiate their takeoff roll. The tower controller was not aware of the vehicle on the runway until advised by the airplane's crew. The airport was equipped with ASDE-X, which did not alert of the runway incursion due to the slow closure rate of the vehicle to the stationary aircraft. Postincident investigation revealed that the driver of the operations vehicle misidentified the runway for an adjacent taxiway.
Probable cause
The driver of the operation vehicle's misidentification of the runway for an adjacent taxiway, resulting in a runway incursion with an aircraft in position for takeoff.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record OPS11IA273
- Event ID
- 20110207X02852
- Case number
- OPS11IA273
- 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 UTC date the NTSB stores; the local time zone is not recorded, so the local date may differ by a day.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 0c02dcf1cb48ce58936c5ce3b0fd92da5b3c99b58b95a9252ec79b2965737afd; retrieved 2026-09-15T15:46:03.487Z.