NYC02FA032 · Beech 95-B55
Beech 95-B55 · Accident: in flight collision with terrain/water en route
From Lawrence Municipal Airport (LWM) to Falmouth Airpark (5B6)
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC02FA032
- 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 95-B55
- Aircraft type
- Beechcraft 55
- 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
- N3847Q
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Lawrence Municipal Airport (LWM), Lawrence, MATo Falmouth Airpark (5B6), Falmouth, MA
- 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
- In flight collision with terrain/water
- 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 › Incapacitation
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
After the pilot requested a decent from his cruising altitude, he was instructed to squawk 1200 and switch to the advisory frequency at the destination airport; however, the pilot did not acknowledge the instruction. No further radio transmissions were received from the airplane. Witnesses reported observing the airplane descend to the water in a straight and level attitude, with the engines developing power. The airplane wreckage was located in 11 feet of water, about 5 miles south of destination airport. Review of radar data revealed that the airplane was descending at a rate of about 300 feet per minute, on a heading of about 190 degrees. The average groundspeed of the airplane during the descent was about 163 knots. The airplane was equipped with an autopilot. Examination of the autopilot annunciator panel by the Safety Board Materials laboratory revealed that the autopilot annunciator panel contained 15 indicators, each of which had one 28 Volt 60 milliamp light bulb. The filaments of each light bulb were examined with a binocular microscope with magnifications of up to 30X. Three of the filaments were stretched and deformed: "AP" (autopilot engagement), "FD" (flight director mode), and "HDG" (heading select/preselect mode). The results of the autopsy and toxicological testing on the pilot were unremarkable.
Probable cause
The incapacitation of the pilot for undetermined reasons which resulted in an in-flight collision with water.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC02FA032
- Event ID
- 20011129X02317
- Case number
- NYC02FA032
- 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, coordinates. 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: 86c91285510f273464da892c0e5bcf6fb81749d73d7ff0108f777fff96752759; retrieved 2026-09-20T20:17:08.499Z.