IAD96LA137 · Bellanca 8KCAB
Bellanca 8KCAB · Accident: abrupt maneuver during initial climb
From OH (private airstrip) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- IAD96LA137
- 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
- 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
- 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
- N88428
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From OH (private airstrip)To 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
- Initial climb
- 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
- Abrupt maneuver
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Pilot in command › Improper decision
- Pilot in command › Low altitude flight/maneuver, misjudged
- Pilot in command › Pull-up, abrupt
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot/owner asked the passenger if she wanted a ride in his airplane. The passenger stated that during takeoff, she felt as if the airplane was going straight up with the control stick full back. She stated that the left wing went down, and she thought that the pilot was turning left. A private pilot witness on the ground, watching the takeoff, stated that the airplane appeared to be going straight up, and at approximately 100 feet off the ground, the airplane did what the witness called a 'Hammerhead Stall.' The witness never heard the engine stop running. He stated that the airplane descended below a hill, out of his sight, then he heard the noise of impact. The pilot/owner of the airplane stated to the local police that he thought 'he lost power, that the engine just wasn't pulling' and that he thought he reached 600 feet in altitude. The airplane wreckage had collapsed fixed main landing gear with minimum ground scarring. There were fresh deep cuts in the dirt of the rough surrounding turf and both tips of the propeller blade were twisted and bent aft.
Probable cause
the pilot's decision to abruptly maneuver the airplane with insufficient altitude to recover.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record IAD96LA137
- Event ID
- 20001208X06535
- Case number
- IAD96LA137
- 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: 5e8ff644e364951edb989099e8712c6577f71c433977a083eab8c4955ec32492; retrieved 2026-09-21T12:33:14.531Z.