ATL05FA139 · Beech BE-D35
Beech BE-D35 · Accident: loss of engine power during initial climb
From Pryor Field Regional Airport (DCU) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ATL05FA139
- 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 BE-D35
- Aircraft type
- Beechcraft BE-D35
- 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
- N3468B
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Pryor Field Regional Airport (DCU), Decatur, ALTo 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
- 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 engine power
- 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
- Fuel starvation/exhaustion; Stall/spin
- 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
- Fluid, fuel › Starvation/exhaustion
- Pilot in command › Airspeed, not maintained
- Pilot in command › Fuel management, improper
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
Shortly after takeoff from the Decatur Pryor Airport, in Decatur, Alabama, witnesses, observed the airplane at about 100 to 150 feet above a tree line near the crash site. The airplane was nose high and slow, and no engine sound was reported. Witnesses stated that the airplane nosed up slightly, rolled left, then pitched nose down and then collided with the ground. The airplane wreckage was located in a heavily wooded area, near a cotton field to the south of the accident site about 5.6 nautical miles southwest of the airport. On scene examination of the accident found the airplane resting on its partially extended landing gear on a 095-degree magnetic heading, with the engine in a 45-degree nose down angle. Examination of the cockpit found the fuel selector on the right fuel tank. Examination of the right fuel tank found it intact with 3 ounces of fuel remaining. There was no fuel found in the engine fuel lines or fuel pump. There were no mechanical problems reported by the pilot or discovered during the post-accident examination of the airplane.
Probable cause
The pilot's mismanagement of the fuel supply, which resulted in a loss of engine power due to fuel starvation, and subsequent inadvertent stall/spin during the forced landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ATL05FA139
- Event ID
- 20050809X01183
- Case number
- ATL05FA139
- Dataset
- historical-pre2008
- Source SHA-256
- 89e2df6d848e7ab3b42e7d7c7a03ff403303057a26ca04c95b3ea67201c3ce74
Source notes (5)
- 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: 18f68e780cbc29280d46eff50a7cff66607e121166f348d6ca95b29d42582d65; retrieved 2026-09-20T17:56:53.560Z.
- Corrected after a review of the NTSB narrative, which states these values explicitly: departure. The narrative states the flight began "Shortly after takeoff from the Decatur Pryor Airport, in Decatur, Alabama"; the recorded state AK is wrong, the airport is the same.