CEN13IA107 · Swearingen SA227-AC
Business Aviation Courier Swearingen SA227-AC · Incident: runway incursion (vehicle, aircraft or person) during takeoff
From ISN · Williston, ND to Sioux Falls Regional Airport (FSD)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN13IA107
- 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
- General aviation
- 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
Swearingen SA227-AC
- Aircraft type
- Swearingen SA227
- 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
- N3108B
- Operator
- Business Aviation Courier
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From ISN · Williston, NDTo Sioux Falls Regional Airport (FSD), Sioux Falls, SD
- 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 91: General Aviation
- 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
- Takeoff
- 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 › Psychological
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot reported that he made several radio calls announcing his intention to take off and that he did not hear any radio calls from other aircraft or vehicles. At the end of the ground roll, he heard a "garbled" transmission stating something about the departure runway. He stated that, as the airplane lifted off, he saw a snowplow on the runway heading in the opposite direction. He continued the takeoff and flew over the snowplow. The snowplow driver stated that he did not hear any radios transmissions from the airplane until after it was airborne and that he had been plowing for about 30 minutes and had made radio calls every 2 to 3 minutes announcing his position. Another pilot who landed about 30 minutes after the incident reported that he also saw a snowplow operating on the airport and that he did not hear any radio calls from the snowplow even after it had crossed a runway. A postincident check of the snowplow and airplane radios revealed that they were functioning properly. The reason why the pilot and snowplow driver were not aware of each other's presence could not be determined due to the lack of recorded radio transmissions and because the airplane and snowplow radios were functioning properly. However, Federal Aviation Administration guidelines to ground vehicle operators state that they need to yield right-of-way to moving aircraft and that they need to ensure that no potential conflict with a moving aircraft exists.
Probable cause
The snowplow driver’s failure to ensure that the runway was clear before driving onto it, which resulted in a runway incursion with a departing airplane.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN13IA107
- Event ID
- 20121218X11015
- Case number
- CEN13IA107
- 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: 7716fd175a88b118b98c1a192be19c142760b42fd85d3f03b22c8e533407d0ef; retrieved 2026-09-15T20:37:33.238Z.