LAX96FA114 · Bellanca 8KCAB
Bellanca 8KCAB · Accident: in flight collision with terrain/water while maneuvering
From Glendale Municipal Airport (GEU) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX96FA114
- 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 8KCAB
- 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
- N2596Z
- Operator
- Jake Starr
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Glendale Municipal Airport (GEU), Glendale, AZTo 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
- In flight collision with terrain/water
- 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 › Altitude/clearance, not maintained
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot told the operator that he intended to go to the designated aerobatic practice area. The aircraft's wreckage was found the next morning several miles north of that location. The elevation at the aerobatic practice area was about 1,500 feet msl. Ground elevation at the accident site was estimated to be about 1,700 to 1,800 feet msl. The pilot was practicing in anticipation of continued video taping which was scheduled to resume within the next few days. For this recording session, there were plans to use a ground positioned video camera. In the previous video, a cockpit positioned camera had been used for the recording. In that recording, the pilot had entered the maneuvers between 2,000 and 2,500 feet msl, generally descending between 200 to 400 feet in the course of a maneuver. The aircraft struck the ground in a 30-degree downward angle with forward airspeed.
Probable cause
failure of the pilot to maintain proper altitude/clearance above the terrain, while performing an aerobatic maneuver.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX96FA114
- Event ID
- 20001208X05273
- Case number
- LAX96FA114
- 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 1996-02-18.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 35b1c57cc45056d9d0ff077d4db1b6d1dde03762cd6781c80e692523e6a3e5c0; retrieved 2026-09-20T23:25:47.727Z.