Piedmont Airlines Flight 4117
Boeing DHC-8-102 · Accident: ground handling event while taxiing
From Tri-State Airport / Milton J. Ferguson Field (HTS) to Charlotte Douglas International Airport (CLT)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA12LA147
- 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
- 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
Boeing DHC-8-102
- Aircraft type
- Boeing DHC-8
- 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
- N839EX
- Operator
- Piedmont Airlines
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Tri-State Airport / Milton J. Ferguson Field (HTS), Huntington, WVTo Charlotte Douglas International Airport (CLT), Charlotte, NC
- 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
- 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
- Ground handling event
- 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
- Environmental issues › Operating environment
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
According to the captain and the first officer, they were instructed to taxi the airplane to an unspecified deice area to remove frost from the airframe. As they taxied, a ground crewmember stood by the wing to ensure the airplane’s clearance from another airline’s equipment and signaled thumbs up to the flight crew to indicate when they were clear of the equipment. After taxiing a short distance, the flight crew stopped and awaited further instructions from a ramp agent on the radio for positioning the airplane. Unknown to the flight crew, the deicing team misunderstood the thumbs-up signal to mean that deicing could begin. Consequently, they moved into a position behind the airplane’s left wing and in front of the left horizontal tail. The ramp agent working the radio could not see the airplane from the radio location and, believing it was still at the gate, instructed the flight crew to taxi 50 feet and stop for deicing. The flight crew initiated taxiing and almost immediately felt a bump, colliding with the boom arm of the deice truck. They then stopped the airplane. The deice truck was not equipped for radio communication; therefore, the team’s movement and position could not be coordinated with the other ground personnel or flight crew.
Probable cause
The inadequate communication among ground crew personnel, which resulted in the airplane’s collision with a deice truck.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA12LA147
- Event ID
- 20120118X91324
- Case number
- ERA12LA147
- 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. 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: dad1b90936e430fac2e8013475ad8c52076951ebccd6ba798edb4b2075ddb9a7; retrieved 2026-09-15T17:04:25.442Z.