MIA03CA117 · Beech 95-B55
Beech 95-B55 · Accident: wheels up landing
From Copiah County Airport (M11) to Forest, MS
Event
- NTSB case
- MIA03CA117
- 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
- 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
- N258P
- Operator
- Allen Kitchens
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Copiah County Airport (M11), Crystal Springs, MSTo Forest, MS
- 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
- Landing · flare/touchdown
- 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
- Wheels up landing
- 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 › Checklist, not performed
- Pilot in command › Gear extension, not performed
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
According to the pilot when he started turning base leg he began noticing that the plane was not slowing down like it should and he decided to lower to full flaps. This still "did not alert" him to the fact that the gear was not down. When he turned to final he increased the speed, to about 1OO knots all the way down to short final. He held 15 inches of manifold pressure up until the flair. At the time of flair he reduced the power to idle, and immediately the landing gear warning horn started sounding. He said his mind "was stuck on airspeed," he "immediately" thought it was the stall warning horn, and lowered the nose a little. He leveled the wings, held the airplane off the runway, and bled off airspeed. When the airplane finally touched down, about half way down the runway the "grinding" sound started, and he realized the landing gear was retracted. An inspection of the cockpit showed the landing gear handle in the "up position." The on scene investigation revealed that the airplane had slid on its belly for over 1,000 feet. The pilot, was at the scene and immediately reported to the FAA inspector, "...that he had forgot to put the landing gear down." He further stated he had a checklist but "did not use it." The airplane received substantial damage to the bottom fuselage; to the extent several ribs were ground completely through the thickness of the metal.
Probable cause
the failure of the pilot-in-command to extend the landing gear, or use the checklist while on landing approach, resulting in a gear up landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record MIA03CA117
- Event ID
- 20030610X00833
- Case number
- MIA03CA117
- 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: 5419dd22a74b23ecf015201a2bb6e3b14f73ae40a634ca310d67d5df06d02634; retrieved 2026-09-22T09:14:19.320Z.