CHI06LA073 · Bellanca 7ECA
Bellanca 7ECA · Accident: loss of control in flight while maneuvering
From Oakland County International Airport (PTK) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI06LA073
- 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
- 2 · 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
Bellanca 7ECA
- Aircraft type
- Bellanca 7
- 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
- N55CW
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Oakland County International Airport (PTK), Pontiac, MITo 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
- Maneuvering · turn to reverse direction
- 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
- 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
- Flightcrew › Airspeed, not maintained
- Flightcrew › Maneuver, excessive
- Flightcrew › Stall, 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 airplane was destroyed when it impacted the ground while maneuvering for landing. After completing a touch and go landing on runway 27L, the pilot requested a full stop landing at which time the control tower operator offered to allow the airplane to land on a parallel runway in the opposite direction. Communications transcripts show that the pilot accepted this offer and was subsequently cleared for landing on runway 09L. The airplane impacted the ground off of the approach end of runway 09L. According to several witnesses the airplane had been performing takeoffs and landings prior to the accident. Witnesses reported that during preceding traffic patterns, the airplane was making steep bank turns that were not necessary for normal flight. Transcripts of communications show that the airplane was cleared for landing a total of 24 times during the 67 minute flight, yielding an average traffic pattern of less than 3 minutes between landings. No anomalies were found with respect to the airplane that could be determined to have existed prior to impact.
Probable cause
The excessive bank angle executed by the flight crew and their failure to maintain airspeed during the turn, which led to the inadvertent stall and subsequent impact with the ground. A factor was the low altitude.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI06LA073
- Event ID
- 20060203X00159
- Case number
- CHI06LA073
- 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: 5d09126cf1164b3871c11db22269f53bc4c2ab6777b3f2da6893b99a9838ce34; retrieved 2026-09-20T17:34:30.778Z.