NYC00LA270 · Beech A36
Beech A36 · Accident: uncontrolled altitude deviation en route
From Teterboro Airport (TEB) to Dillant Hopkins Airport (EEN)
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC00LA270
- 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 A36
- Aircraft type
- Beechcraft 36
- 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
- N100XH
- Operator
- Simon V. Habermand · private individual
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Teterboro Airport (TEB), TETERBORO, NJTo Dillant Hopkins Airport (EEN), Keene, NH
- 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
- Uncontrolled altitude deviation
- 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 › Aircraft control, not maintained
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot reported that while flying in IMC, he was having difficulty with the autopilot. Specifically, he was having problems holding assigned headings, and engaging the autopilot. The airplane then began a rapid descent, but the pilot was able to recover once in VMC. Prior to the accident flight, the pilot experienced difficulty with another airplane. In that airplane, with a different model autopilot, he lost control while landing. According to representatives from the airplane and autopilot manufacturers, the pilot and owner complained about autopilot problems in the past. However, on at least two occasions prior to the accident flight, the owner or pilot of the airplane had been operating the autopilot while the airplane was outside the specifications for safe autopilot operation. Prior to the accident, three separate test flights did not reveal any malfunctions. After the accident, the pilot stated that he might have departed with the autopilot in the slaved nav heading disengaged mode. Subsequently, data retrieved from the autopilot did not indicate any malfunctions.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain aircraft control. A factor was the pilot's diverted attention.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC00LA270
- Event ID
- 20001212X21853
- Case number
- NYC00LA270
- 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: d7b46746b2d144bb5df8c90f3c569c3143aeff01229b1c0176a74512cd81f0b6; retrieved 2026-09-22T12:35:56.170Z.