DEN02TA052 · Beech 58P
Beech 58P · Accident: in flight encounter with weather en route
From Grand Junction Regional Airport (GJT) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- DEN02TA052
- 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
- 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
- Government
- 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 58P
- Aircraft type
- Beechcraft 58
- 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
- N123Z
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Grand Junction Regional Airport (GJT), Grand Junction, COTo not recorded
- 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
- Public Aircraft
- 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
- In flight encounter with weather
- 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 › Flight into adverse weather, inadvertent
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot departed Grand Junction, Colorado (GJT) on fire assignment as a Forest Service lead airplane, to the Coal Seam Fire in Garfield County, Colorado, in the vicinity of Glenwood Springs. The pilot reported experiencing low-level wind shear and light, moderate, and severe turbulence from just after takeoff through arriving at the area of operation. Following a reconnaissance of the fire, the pilot reported climbing to approximately 5,000 feet agl (above ground level) to avoid the turbulence and wait for wind conditions to improve so that tanker operations (aircraft dropping fire suppressant chemicals on the wildfire) could begin. The pilot reported that wind conditions improved and tanker operations commenced. On conclusion of the tanker operations, the pilot returned to GJT. The pilot reported he was in the vicinity of the Book Cliffs, approximately 10 miles northeast of GJT, approximately 2,000 feet agl in a low power descent, and an airspeed of approximately 150-160 knots, when he encountered one significant event of severe turbulence. The pilot reported the winds were out of the southwest at 20 knots with gusts to 29 knots. The airplane continued to GJT and landed uneventfully. The aircraft damage was noted the following morning during a routine preflight inspection. An examination of the airplane showed the top skin of the airplane's left wing, between the fuselage and the left engine nacelle, was buckled. No other anomalies were found. The reported winds at GJT, 34 minutes prior to the event, were 180 degrees at 20 knots with gusts to 28 knots.
Probable cause
the pilot's inadvertent flight into adverse weather conditions. A factor contributing to the accident was the terrain-induced turbulence.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DEN02TA052
- Event ID
- 20020618X00910
- Case number
- DEN02TA052
- 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: local date, investigation status, coordinates. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2002-06-10.
- API snapshot SHA-256: cad063ab98cf42d364023676e21e3c687d649d1450cfa2645e8149336cbf333b; retrieved 2026-09-18T21:19:00.723Z.