NYC95FA188 · Beech 58
Beech 58 · Accident: total loss of engine power (mechanical failure) en route
From Caribou Municipal Airport (CAR) to Portsmouth International Airport at Pease (PSM)
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC95FA188
- 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
Beech 58
- Aircraft type
- Beechcraft 58
- 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
- N168CG
- Operator
- Rene J. Nicol · private individual
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Caribou Municipal Airport (CAR), Caribou, METo Portsmouth International Airport at Pease (PSM), Portsmouth, NH
- 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
- En route · climb to cruise
- 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
- Total loss of engine power (mechanical failure)
- Also codedOther events the NTSB coded in the sequence, such as a wire strike after a loss of power. Flight Findings uses them for its kinds of event. Glossary
- Stall/spin
- 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
- Pilot in command › Airspeed, not maintained
- Pilot in command › Stall/spin, inadvertent
- Pilot in command › Wrong engine shutdown, inadvertent
- Pilot in command › Wrong propeller feathered, inadvertent
Approximate · Estimated position: the centre of Mapleton, ME, the place the record names. Not the accident site.
NTSB narrative
The pilot departed at night and initiated a climb to cruise altitude. A witness heard the engine(s) operating normally, and then silence. The witness then observed the airplane, descending and rotating in a nose down attitude. The airplane descended through trees, in a left spin, and impacted the ground. An examination revealed that both propellers were feathered, and the landing gear was retracted. The inspection of the left engine disclosed that the number six and number five connecting rods had failed, and the number four connecting rod had evidence of overheating. There was evidence that the number six rod had failed first, allowing for oil starvation and subsequent failure of the number five connecting rod.
Probable cause
The pilot inadvertently shut down the right engine and feathered the propeller after a loss of power in the left engine, and he failed to maintain adequate airspeed, which resulted in an inadvertent stall/spin and collision with the ground. A factor relating to the accident was failure of the number six and number five connecting rods in the left engine, which resulted in a loss of power in that engine.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC95FA188
- Event ID
- 20001207X04341
- Case number
- NYC95FA188
- 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: local date, investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 1995-08-14.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 937d3b0e18642f667c3e4ac2feb207eb40a51b5eeb9e9bf438621d9b06d6d70b; retrieved 2026-09-20T23:40:03.755Z.