FTW01FA003 · Beech B19
Beech B19 · Accident: loss of control in flight while maneuvering
From UNK · TX to Rick Husband Amarillo International Airport (AMA)
Event
- NTSB case
- FTW01FA003
- 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
- 1 · 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 B19
- Aircraft type
- Beechcraft 19
- 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
- N5108R
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From UNK · TXTo Rick Husband Amarillo International Airport (AMA), Amarillo, TX
- 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
- Maneuvering
- 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
- Loss of control in flight
- 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 › Aircraft control, not maintained
- Pilot in command › Spatial disorientation
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
Dark night conditions prevailed under overcast skies when the non-instrument rated private pilot took off to fly his single engine airplane form his private airstrip to an airport located 29 nautical miles from his airfield. The pilot often used his airplane to commute to and from his place of employment. The accident occurred in a very sparsely populated area that lacked visual cues at night. The airplane impacted a level cultivated field in a nose down attitude while in a left turn, approximately 2 nautical miles north-northeast (021 degrees) from the point of departure. The 254-hour pilot had accumulated a total of 51 hours in the same make and model airplane, a total of 17.5 hours of night time, and 2.5 hours of simulated instrument time. There was no record of a distress call from the aircraft. No anomalies were found with the airframe or engine that could have contributed to the accident. Radar data indicated the airplane departed from the coordinates of the home landing strip and tracked somewhat of a direct course toward the intended destination bearing north northwest at altitudes ranging from 4,100 feet to 4,800 feet MSL. The data showed the airplane in a left turn bearing almost west for about 10 seconds before the radar returns ended abruptly. The accident site was located about 1/2 mile north of the last radar return. The radar data did not show a gradual descent. The last return showed the airplane at 4,700 feet MSL, and then no returns. The reported cloud cover in the area at the time of the accident was 1,600 feet overcast. The terrain elevation was 3,700 feet MSL.
Probable cause
The pilot's loss of control due to spatial disorientation. Contributing factors were the low ceilings, the dark night illumination, the lack of visual cues, and the pilot's lack of instrument flight qualification or experience.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record FTW01FA003
- Event ID
- 20001212X22148
- Case number
- FTW01FA003
- 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: a15ab7ff54f9c3a5718030b6e7765c9fc30364037c59bcc2b1e4b42e35bf1301; retrieved 2026-09-20T20:49:31.596Z.