BFO95FA082 · Bellanca 8GCBC
United Aerial Advertising Bellanca 8GCBC · Accident: airframe, component or system failure while maneuvering
From 4NY7 to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- BFO95FA082
- 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
- 1 · all aircraft and ground
- Ground fatalities
- 0
- 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
- Visual Meteorological Cond
Bellanca 8GCBC
- Aircraft type
- Bellanca 8
- 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
- N86587
- Operator
- United Aerial Advertising
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From 4NY7To not recorded
- 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
- Maneuvering
- First occurrenceThe 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
- Airframe, component or system failure
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Destroyed
Cause areas
- Reason for occurrence undetermined
- Wing, spar › Failure, total
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
Witnesses stated that the pilot missed the banner pick up on the first pass, and returned for a second attempt. One witness stated that when the pilot missed the banner pick up again, and began to climb out the second time, '...a portion of the right wing folded back.' The witness reported that the airplane rolled to the right, and the nose dropped below the horizon. The airplane impacted terrain, and a postcrash fire ensued. Winds were reported to be out of the northeast at 10 knots, with gusts to 20 knots. Postaccident examination of the wing was complicated by fire damage; however, the USDA Forest Products Laboratory examination revealed that the wooden spar failure was '...caused by a force applied in an upward direction...' and that there was '...no apparent [preimpact] problem with the quality of the wooden material....'
Probable cause
the structural failure of the wing for undetermined reasons.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record BFO95FA082
- Event ID
- 20001207X04161
- Case number
- BFO95FA082
- Dataset
- historical-pre2008
- Source SHA-256
- 89e2df6d848e7ab3b42e7d7c7a03ff403303057a26ca04c95b3ea67201c3ce74
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. 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: 92eb862670f919b497ddf87f42cc954a1d7a24be6b38e362aa495d3a01d35ab4; retrieved 2026-09-20T23:39:41.465Z.