DEN01FA088 · Beech 35
Beech 35 · Accident: loss of control in flight during initial climb
From Sumers Airpark (GWS) to Boise Air Terminal/Gowen Field (BOI)
Event
- NTSB case
- DEN01FA088
- 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
- Unknown
- 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 35
- 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
- N2PZ
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Sumers Airpark (GWS), Glenwood Springs, COTo Boise Air Terminal/Gowen Field (BOI), Boise, ID
- 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
- Initial climb
- 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
- Also codedOther events the NTSB coded in the sequence, such as a wire strike after a loss of power. Flight Findings uses them for its kinds of event. Glossary
- Stall/mush
- 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 › Stall/mush, inadvertent
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot was departing on runway 14, with a tailwind, at a mountain airport (elevation 5,916 feet; density altitude 8,016 feet) with near the aft limit CG. Witnesses said that the airplane rotated quickly and excessively. They said that the landing gear doors opened almost immediately even though the airplane's speed appeared slow and its pitch remained excessively high. Several of the witnesses observed the airplane wobbling side to side. A flight instructor, who was watching the departure, said that airplane never got higher than 100 feet above the ground. He said that he saw the airplane pitch up even more (the longitudinal trim was found 10 degrees nose down), and then it stalled into the ground. The pilot had purchased the airplane on March 30, 2001, and reported, on an insurance application for the airplane, that he had approximately 200 hours of total flight experience over 10 years, with 15 hours in retractable gear aircraft. The pilot had accumulated an estimated 20 hours of flight experience in the airplane by the time of the accident. Examination of the airplane and engine revealed no evidence of any pre-impact discrepancies.
Probable cause
the pilot's failure to maintain aircraft control, and the subsequent inadvertent stall/mush to the ground. Contributing factors were the pilot's lack of experience in make/model airplane, the high density altitude weather condition, and the pilot's attempted departure with a tailwind.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DEN01FA088
- Event ID
- 20010423X00803
- Case number
- DEN01FA088
- 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: 29dd54e1c8e6983b497836a0c0f19d7376f5b814fb52dbd976dedc54fdffd2cd; retrieved 2026-09-20T20:35:32.618Z.