Frontier Airlines Flight 450
Airbus A320 214 · Accident: ground handling event during pushback
From KDIA · Denver, CO to Buffalo Niagara International Airport (BUF)
Event
- NTSB case
- DCA19CA079
- 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
Airbus A320 214
- Aircraft type
- Airbus A320
- 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
- N220FR
- Operator
- Frontier Airlines
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From KDIA · Denver, COTo Buffalo Niagara International Airport (BUF), Buffalo, NY
- Aircraft age
- About 6 years (built 2013)
- 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
- Pushback/towing
- 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
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
On January 28, 2019, about 0617 mountain standard time, Frontier Airlines flight 450, an Airbus A320-214, N220FR, was struck by the tug during pushback operations at Denver International Airport (KDEN), Denver, Colorado. There were no injuries and the airplane received substantial damage. The regularly scheduled domestic passenger flight was operating under the provisions of Title 14 Code of Federal Regulations Part 121 from KDEN to Buffalo International Airport (KBUF), Buffalo, New York. According to flight crew statements, the crew advised the tug driver they were cleared to push back, either tail east or straight back. At the time of the accident, dark night conditions existed and the ramp was contaminated with snow. During the pushback, the flight crew started No. 1 and 2 engines. The tug driver pushed the airplane back with its empennage towards the east and then notified the captain that he would pull forward to straighten them out. As the tug driver pulled the airplane forward and was coming to a stop the airplane's nose began to drift to the left. The tug detached from the airplane and impacted the right forward fuselage and right engine air intake resulting in substantial damage. The captain noted that the nose swung to the left, and then said it felt as if the airplane was moving backwards. According to the operator, on the morning of the accident, the ramp management company had instructed their ground personnel that all pushbacks should be straight back pushes due to the snowy conditions. It is likely that the angle of the towbar from pushing the airplane back to the east, combined with the snow contaminated ramp and the engine idle thrust, caused the tug driver to lose control of the tug during the pushback.
Probable cause
loss of control of the tug by the driver during pushback operations as a result of the contaminated ramp, angle of the towbar, and the airplane engines being at idle thrust.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DCA19CA079
- Event ID
- 20190208X10711
- Case number
- DCA19CA079
- 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, coordinates, cause areas. 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: bdb7ddea51f1e50d5b729bcfffe305cc34928b60251694612935b8ac217e7007; retrieved 2026-09-16T08:35:14.366Z.