IAD97LA034 · Piper PA-28-140
Piper PA-28-140 · Accident: loss of engine power during initial climb
From Beverly Regional Airport (BVY) to Beverly Regional Airport (BVY)
Event
- NTSB case
- IAD97LA034
- 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
Piper PA-28-140
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-28
- 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
- N7246F
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Beverly Regional Airport (BVY)To Beverly Regional Airport (BVY)
- 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
- Loss of engine power
- 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
- 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 › Airspeed, not maintained
- Pilot in command › Stall, inadvertent
- Reason for occurrence undetermined
Approximate · Estimated position: the centre of Beverly, MA, the place the record names. Not the accident site.
NTSB narrative
According to the air traffic controller, the pilot had completed a touch-and-go landing and was on climb-out, when he reported having engine difficulty. The airplane was at approximately 500 feet. After the pilot was cleared to land, the airplane turned left and banked about 90 degrees. A witness stated that the airplane 'seemed to fall backwards to the ground.' He stated the airplane was in a nose high altitude, about 50 degrees above the horizon. The airplane then seemed to fall off over the left wing and make a slight rotation. He did not hear any sound from the airplane. The airplane impacted the ground in a nose down attitude. No airframe or engine anomaly was noted during a post-accident examination of the aircraft wreckage.
Probable cause
loss of engine power for undetermined reason(s), and failure of the pilot to maintain adequate airspeed, while maneuvering for a forced landing, which resulted in a stall and subsequent in-flight collision with terrain.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record IAD97LA034
- Event ID
- 20001208X07178
- Case number
- IAD97LA034
- 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: 052ce8800b98ce9df26527314a2b60042d826eff25b7273a3ead243b719333c2; retrieved 2026-09-20T23:04:59.310Z.