Saab 2000

The Saab 2000 has a good record, with one caveat: there are very few of them. Up to 7 October 2026, in about 1.2 million passenger flights, one fatal accident is on file, and one person died in it. With only 63 aircraft built and about 15 still flying, a single crash would change the picture a lot, so treat the record as encouraging rather than proven.

What the Saab 2000 is

Saab stretched its Saab 340 into a 50-seat airliner that could keep up with jets on short routes. The 2000 first flew in 1992 and entered service in 1994 with Crossair in Switzerland. It has Rolls-Royce AE2100 engines driving six-blade propellers and cruises at about 665 km/h, close to a regional jet on a one-hour sector. It came too late: airlines were already buying the 50-seat jets from Embraer and Bombardier, and production stopped after 63 aircraft. A few were converted into airborne early-warning aircraft for air forces, which our data does not count.

Where you fly on one

The 2000 flew mostly in Europe: with Crossair and later Swiss, SAS Commuter, Carpatair in Romania, Darwin Airline (which also flew as Etihad Regional) and British regional airlines. In the US, PenAir used it in Alaska, including on the route from Anchorage to Unalaska. Today only a handful still carry passengers, mainly with small charter and regional operators.

The one fatal accident

On 17 October 2019 a PenAir Saab 2000 from Anchorage landed at Unalaska, one of the hardest airports in the US: a 4,500-foot runway squeezed between mountains and water. The crew had already gone around once, and the wind had turned into a tailwind above the aircraft's limit. After touchdown the left main gear would not brake properly. The aircraft ran off the end, through a fence, across a road and hit a sign. The left propeller shattered and a blade went into the cabin. One passenger died of injuries the next day; 41 of the 42 on board survived.

The NTSB found the root cause in maintenance: the gear overhaul shop had wired the wheel speed sensors wrongly, so the anti-skid system failed and a tyre burst. It also blamed Saab's harness design, which made that error easy, the FAA for approving the aircraft at Unalaska without weighing its small runway safety areas, and the crew and PenAir for the decision to land.

Accidents without deaths

Four other Saab 2000s have been written offHull lossAn accident in which an aircraft is destroyed or damaged beyond economic repair. People may or may not be hurt.More in the glossary without anyone being killed. On 10 July 2002 Swiss flight 850 was turned away from Hamburg, Bremen, Hannover and Berlin by storms and, short of fuel, was sent to a former military airfield at Werneuchen. The crew did not see an earth bank built across the runway, and the gear was torn off; everyone survived. In 2014 an Etihad Regional Saab 2000 bounced twice on landing at Paris-CDG and the nose gear collapsed, with no injuries. A Carpatair take-off accident at Craiova in 2012 and a towing accident at Stockholm in 1999 make up the rest. A sixth airframe, a Pakistan Air Force Saab 2000 AEW&C radar aircraft, was destroyed on the ground when militants attacked Kamra air base in August 2012. As a military loss it is left out of the hull-loss count on this page, which is why the page shows five where ASN lists six write-offs.

How a small fleet is scored

With 1.2 million flights, one event weighs heavily either way. Our methodology starts each type from the average record of its design generation, here the modern turboprops such as the ATR 72 and Dash 8, and moves towards the type's own history as flights add up. The Saab 2000's own record pulls it in a good direction, but the small numbers keep it close to its group.

How to tell if you are on one

Flight trackers show the ICAO code SB20. On board you see a low wing, large six-blade propellers and a cabin with two seats on one side of the aisle and one on the other. On a type this rare, the operator's maintenance and crew training tell you more than the aircraft's history.