Ameriflight Beech 99 incident
Beech 99 · Incident: airframe, component or system failure en route
From Salt Lake City International Airport (SLC) to Boise Air Terminal/Gowen Field (BOI)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX96IA065
- 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
- Incident
- 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
- 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
- Charter & commuter
- 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 99
- Aircraft type
- Beechcraft 99
- 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
- N134PM
- Operator
- Ameriflight
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Salt Lake City International Airport (SLC)To Boise Air Terminal/Gowen Field (BOI), Boise, ID
- 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 135: Air Taxi & Commuter
- 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
- 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
- None
Cause areas
- Company maintenance personnel › Maintenance, installation, improper
- Flt control syst, rudder control cable/rod › Chafed
- Flt control syst, rudder control cable/rod › Failure
- Flt control syst, rudder control cable/rod › Fatigue
Approximate · Estimated position: the centre of Salt Lake City, UT, the place the record names. Not the accident site.
NTSB narrative
The pilot reported that shortly after takeoff, he felt a sharp jolt in the rudder pedals as the landing gear was retracting; after that, the aircraft would no longer respond to left rudder pedal input. The pilot declared an emergency and made an uneventful landing. Postflight examination of the aircraft revealed that the left rudder control cable had failed in proximity of a control pulley in the aft fuselage. Examination of the two cable retaining pins on the pulley braket showed cable scrape marks at their midpoints. The cable had been installed 3 months before the incident and had accumulated 183 hours in service. Metallurgical examination of the failed cable revealed evidence that at least a portion of the strands had failed from fatigue.
Probable cause
improper installation of the rudder control cable by company maintenance personnel, which resulted in chafing and/or fatigue and subsequent failure of the cable.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX96IA065
- Event ID
- 20001207X04869
- Case number
- LAX96IA065
- Dataset
- historical-pre2008
- Source SHA-256
- 89e2df6d848e7ab3b42e7d7c7a03ff403303057a26ca04c95b3ea67201c3ce74
Source notes (5)
- 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, damage. 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: 417e2d963a6d91fcdb6051f618d7aac2081970cd62b854b9b9177f472eb0b12e; retrieved 2026-09-18T17:56:04.232Z.
- The NTSB's operator name is blank for N134PM; the operator shown is the name the NTSB's other records give its FAA operator code, JIKA.