SEA96LA181 · Beech 35
Beech 35 · Accident: airframe, component or system failure en route
From Felts Field (SFF) to Colville Municipal Airport (63S)
Event
- NTSB case
- SEA96LA181
- 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
- Unknown
Beech 35
- Aircraft type
- Beechcraft 35
- 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
- N2839V
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Felts Field (SFF), WATo Colville Municipal Airport (63S), Colville, WA
- 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 · 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
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Reason for occurrence undetermined
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
About five minutes after takeoff, at 6,500 feet, the 1947 model airplane was cruising at 160 to 165 knots, when it encountered turbulence and experienced an airframe vibration. The pilot reduced airspeed, which eliminated the vibration, then he landed without further incident. Subsequent examination revealed that the fuselage station 256.9 bulkhead, located directly below the leading edge of the V-tail, was cracked at all four corners. Further investigation revealed that the airplane's ruddervators had been removed in 1995 for reskinning due to corrosion. Reskinning was accomplished with Beech factory replacement skins, and the ruddervators were then painted with several layers of paint. This necessitated the installation of an additional one-pound (lead) weight on the outboard tip of each ruddervator to achieve correct control surface balance. Also, the pilot stated that he could not be sure whether the station 256.9 bulkhead was damaged in flight, or when the ruddervator contacted a hangar support beam as the airplane was being pushed in a hangar.
Probable cause
failure (cracking) of the aft fuselage bulkhead for undetermined reason(s).
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record SEA96LA181
- Event ID
- 20001208X06622
- Case number
- SEA96LA181
- 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: 7eeedad3bb0e99b2d7afa0332982af031186949c38d918b179a5473273ccc11d; retrieved 2026-09-22T21:40:20.995Z.