DEN00LA088 · Beech V35B
Beech V35B · Accident en route
From Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport (BJC) to Hastings Municipal Airport (HSI)
Event
- NTSB case
- DEN00LA088
- 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
- Visual Meteorological Cond
Beech V35B
- 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
- N6643Q
- Operator
- Dave L. Sherman · private individual
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport (BJC), Broomfield, COTo Hastings Municipal Airport (HSI), Hastings, NE
- 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 · climb to 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
- 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
- Mixture control › Activated
- Pilot in command › Mixture, inadvertent use
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
During climb to cruise on a cross-country flight the passenger door came open and the pilot made a precautionary approach for landing at an airport along his route. After initiating descent for landing, the pilot discovered that the engine had lost all power. The landing was made short of the intended runway with the landing gear retracted. Following the landing, and evacuation of the aircraft by the pilot and his passengers, witnesses found the cockpit fully configured for flight with the throttle and propeller controls full forward and the magnetos and master switch on. However, the mixture was in the cutoff position. Examination and testing of the passenger door revealed no abnormalities. The flight was the pilot's first flight after being signed off as competent to perform as pilot in command in this make and model aircraft. He had accumulated approximately 4 hours flight experience in the aircraft with a total flight time of 207 hours all in single engine land airplanes.
Probable cause
Inadvertent cut off of the mixture by the pilot. Factors were: The passenger door opening, the pilot's inexperience in make and model, and rough, uneven terrain in the landing area.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DEN00LA088
- Event ID
- 20001212X20979
- Case number
- DEN00LA088
- 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: 4bdc23667e6a537b8b06ba3148bec67348b4261fd81a4d430ca96f0f22058c88; retrieved 2026-09-22T12:54:03.864Z.