United Express Beech 1900D accident
Beech 1900D · Accident during initial climb
From Portland International Airport (PDX) to Yakima Air Terminal McAllister Field (YKM)
Event
- NTSB case
- SEA97LA085
- 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
- Airline
- 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 1900D
- Aircraft type
- Beechcraft 1900
- 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
- N75ZV
- Operator
- United Express
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Portland International Airport (PDX)To Yakima Air Terminal McAllister Field (YKM), Yakima, 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 121: Air Carrier
- 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
- Miscellaneous/other
- 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
- Flightcrew › Aircraft preflight, inadequate
- Ground personnel › Dispatch, inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The ramp agent handling the flight, who is required by company procedures to check doors secured during a pre-departure check, stated, '...upon my releasing them to taxi I did not notice anything different, all doors were closed.' The captain reported that as the gear was brought up on takeoff, the flightcrew heard a 'loud wind noise.' He stated that they had no indications of anything wrong on the annunciator panel (which contains a red CARGO DOOR warning light to indicate that the cargo door is open or not secure.) He reported that they then looked in the back of the aircraft, and the passengers told them that the cargo door had come open. The crew then returned to land. An inventory of the cargo compartment contents after landing revealed that no baggage had been lost. During postaccident examination of the aircraft, the aft cargo door locking handle was observed in the unlocked position as the door was swung down, and visual inspection of the aft cargo door locks, switches, and annunciator cargo door warning systems found no discrepancies with the aft cargo door or its indicating/warning system.
Probable cause
the flightcrew's inadequate preflight, and the ramp agent's inadequate dispatch of the aircraft. The unsecured cargo door was a factor.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record SEA97LA085
- Event ID
- 20001208X07825
- Case number
- SEA97LA085
- 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. 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: c9eca6980197f75cce79c1cc53081a68e922e899c07bbefd1a29a59e1a54dde9; retrieved 2026-09-18T17:39:57.363Z.
- The NTSB's operator name is blank for N75ZV; the operator shown is the name the NTSB records it doing business as.