Pinnacle Airlines - Incidents and Accidents

Incidents and Accidents

• Flight 3701 was a Bombardier CRJ200 with a crew of two operating a re-position flight (with no passengers) from Little Rock, Arkansas to Minneapolis, Minnesota. It crashed on October 14, 2004 in a residential area in Jefferson City, Missouri due to the flight crew pushing the plane past its capabilities and ignoring warnings. Both pilots were killed.
• Flight 4712 was a Bombardier CRJ200LR from Minneapolis that overran the runway when landing at Cherry Capital Airport (TVC), Traverse City, Michigan. The plane was damaged, but no one was injured. The NTSB determined that the cause of the accident was the "pilots’ decision to land at TVC without performing a landing distance assessment" which in turn was caused by fatigued pilots and unclear directions from the TVC controller tower. The report recommended more landing distance training, post-accident drug testing, and further criteria for runway closures in snow and ice conditions.

• The FAA fined Pinnacle over $1 million for allegedly operating two Canadair Regional Jets in 2009 and 2010 that were not in compliance with FAA regulations. On one of the aircraft, the flight crew performed procedures which should have been conducted by maintenance personnel; FAA inspectors had denied a request to make the work an operations task. On a second aircraft, Pinnacle is accused of failing to conduct proper monitoring of a cracked low-pressure turbine case.