DEN00IA075 · Beech A60
Beech A60 · Incident: total loss of engine power (mechanical failure) en route
From Centennial Airport (APA) to 1V5
Event
- NTSB case
- DEN00IA075
- 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
- Incident
- 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
Beech A60
- Aircraft type
- Beechcraft 60
- 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
- N457DA
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Centennial Airport (APA), Englewood, COTo 1V5
- 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 · descent
- 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
- Total loss of engine power (mechanical failure)
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Minor
Cause areas
- Engine assembly, connecting rod cap › Failure, total
- Engine assembly, connecting rod cap › Fatigue
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot said that as he descended to 6,500 feet mean sea level, the left engine of the twin-engine airplane failed. The pilot landed the airplane without further incident. The engine had 23.5 hours on it since major overhaul. An engine teardown revealed that the #6 connecting rod had failed. Examination of the #6 cylinder parts found preexisting fractures on both the rod cap and the connecting rod. The fatigue features displayed on the rod cap are suggestive of lower stress propagation than those stress propagation marks on the connecting rod. It appeared that the engine failure-initiating event was the failure of the rod cap. Examination of the #6 connecting rod bolts indicated that they fractured as a result of overstress.
Probable cause
The fatigue failure of the #6 cylinder connecting rod cap.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DEN00IA075
- Event ID
- 20001212X20089
- Case number
- DEN00IA075
- 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: ded15c317f6b58601ffeffd5d37f92c5c163556cdfe2e9db4a035a6a7f38c2d3; retrieved 2026-09-22T13:43:21.634Z.