Piedmont Airlines Flight 4314
de Havilland DHC8 - 102 · Accident: birdstrike en route
From Greater Binghamton/Edwin A Link field (KBGM) to Philadelphia International Airport (KPHL)
Event
- NTSB case
- DCA14CA031
- 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
de Havilland DHC8 - 102
- Aircraft type
- de Havilland DHC8
- 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
- N808EX
- Operator
- Piedmont Airlines
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Greater Binghamton/Edwin A Link field (KBGM), Binghamton, NYTo Philadelphia International Airport (KPHL), Philadelphia, PA
- 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 · descent
- 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
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Environmental issues › Physical environment
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, not marked as estimated; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
On November 24, 2013, at approximately 2040 EST, a De Havilland DHC-8-102, N808EX, operated by Piedmont Airlines as flight 4314, encountered a flock of a birds during the descent into Philadelphia International Airport (KPHL), Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The airplane was located about 16 miles north of KPHL, and at about 4000 feet mean sea level (msl), when multiple birds impacted the fuselage and wing of the airplane . The flight crew notified air traffic control, and did not declare an emergency. None of the 40 passengers and crew onboard were injured and the airplane was substantially damaged. The flight was operating under 14 Code of Federal Regulations Part 121 as a regularly scheduled passenger flight between Greater Binghamton Airport (KBGM), Binghamton, New York, and KPHL.
The captain was the pilot flying, and stated that flight conditions were night VMC with no moon. The flight crew stated they were at 4,000 feet msl, at about 190 knots airspeed, and on the downwind leg for runway 26 when the bird strike occurred. The flight crew heard multiple thuds and saw some of the birds through the windshield. After the impacts, the flight crew checked instruments, disconnected autopilot, checked for changes in flight characteristics and did not note any changes. The first officer notified ATC of the bird strike and did not declare an emergency. The flight landed uneventfully at KPHL. Post flight maintenance inspection revealed substantial damage to the left front wing spar, left wing skin, and vertical stabilizer deice boot.
Probable cause
an inadvertent encounter with several birds during approach that resulted in substantial damage to the airplane.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DCA14CA031
- Event ID
- 20140106X40632
- Case number
- DCA14CA031
- 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, coordinates. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2013-11-25.
- API snapshot SHA-256: e591129ade8b64beccb2359e0ad2a8f20e785cf979a762283c6ba6a79fb6b3e4; retrieved 2026-09-15T23:14:05.202Z.