DEN00FA135 · Bellanca 17-30
Bellanca 17-30 · Accident: in flight encounter with weather en route
From City of Colorado Springs Municipal Airport (COS) to L15 · Las Vegas, NV
Event
- NTSB case
- DEN00FA135
- 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
- 2 · 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 17-30
- Aircraft type
- Bellanca 17
- 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
- N6691V
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From City of Colorado Springs Municipal Airport (COS), Colorado Springs, COTo L15 · Las Vegas, NV
- 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
- In flight encounter with weather
- 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 › Flight into adverse weather, inadvertent
- Pilot in command › Planning/decision, inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot and his wife were flying from Lagrangeville, New York, to Las Vegas, Nevada, with no winter clothing or survival equipment. The airplane departed Colorado Springs, Colorado, with full fuel tanks, and was last located by an unconfirmed radar report approximately 2 hours later near Creede, Colorado. An extensive search for the airplane started on November 20, 1999, and was unsuccessful. Hikers located the airplane on July 20, 2000, at 12,724 feet. Examination of the accident site indicated the pilot had made a precautionary landing on a mountain ridge. No sectional navigation maps were located in the airplane nor was any flight planning documentation located (the pilot had not filed a flight plan). The airplane was found with the landing gear extended and separated from the airplane. The ELT battery was out of date and the ELT was damaged; a hand held transceiver was located under the pilot's seat; and the airplane's radios were found in the on position. Satellite imagery and meteorological reports indicate that clouds would have obscured the mountain ridges in the accident area. The pilot's son reported that the pilot was recently diagnosed with diabetes, and was taking insulin. The pilot and his wife were found with 'multiple portions of additional items of clothing on,' suggesting both survived the impact.
Probable cause
the pilot's inadequate flight planning and preparation, and his inadvertent flight into adverse weather during a cross-country flight over mountainous terrain. Contributing factors were, the cloudy obscuration weather condition, the high density altitude, and the lack of suitable terrain for a precautionary landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DEN00FA135
- Event ID
- 20001212X20088
- Case number
- DEN00FA135
- 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: c7f2e45a3198147d18a3866d94bf64db62be50dfc91270c207b32faca697b42e; retrieved 2026-09-20T21:38:59.305Z.