ATL06IA071 · Beech C90A
Carolina Air Charter, Inv Beech C90A · Incident: fire en route
From Concord-Padgett Regional Airport (JQF) to IAD · Washington, DC
Event
- NTSB case
- ATL06IA071
- 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
- Incident
- 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
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
Beech C90A
- Aircraft type
- Beechcraft 90
- 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
- N90CH
- Operator
- Carolina Air Charter, Inv
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Concord-Padgett Regional Airport (JQF), Concord, NCTo IAD · Washington, DC
- 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 · 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
- Fire
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Minor
Cause areas
- Manufacturer › Procedure inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
While in cruise flight at 17,000 feet, the pilot smelled smoke. A few seconds later, flames and smoke started shooting out of the lower left windshield. The pilot turned off the windshield heat, and the flames went out, but the smoke persisted. The pilot declared an emergency with air traffic controllers, diverted, and landed the airplane safely. Examination of the airplane found scorch marks and soot on the left windshield near the terminal block. The damaged windshield was shipped to the manufacturer, PPG Industries, Inc., for further examination. Examination revealed the unit showed a condition similar to other units that were found to have overheated blocks during late 1996 and early 1997. These blocks were subject to a joint investigation by Raytheon Aircraft Company and PPG during 1997. That investigation identified the root cause of the terminal block overheating, relating to the manufacturing process. The manufacturing process was corrected by PPG in August 1996. Raytheon issued Safety Communiqué No. 134, describing the events, part numbers affected, and procedures to perform in case of such an event. These procedures were added to the FAA-approved airplane operating handbook in June 1997. The damaged windshield from this incident was one of the windshields manufactured just before the manufacturing process was corrected.
Probable cause
The inadequate manufacturing process, which resulted in a windshield fire and subsequent emergency landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ATL06IA071
- Event ID
- 20060504X00513
- Case number
- ATL06IA071
- 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: 2402ceb1d816b6c1b3ab80c4681fa775d4936230f18afef49297b37cb9f68756; retrieved 2026-09-22T04:57:47.913Z.