ATL07FA005 · Beech BE-19A
Beech BE-19A · Accident: in flight encounter with weather en route
From Auburn University Regional Airport (AUO) to City of Murfreesboro Airport (MBT)
Event
- NTSB case
- ATL07FA005
- 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
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
Beech BE-19A
- Aircraft type
- Beechcraft BE-19
- 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
- N6974Q
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Auburn University Regional Airport (AUO), Auburn, ALTo City of Murfreesboro Airport (MBT), Murfreesboro, TN
- 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
- In flight encounter with weather
- 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
- Visual flight rules (VFR) flight into instrument meteorological conditions (IMC)
- 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
- Pilot in command › VFR flight into imc, continued
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
About 24 minutes before departure, the pilot received a weather briefing from a flight service station that informed him that overcast conditions at 1200 feet could be expected along his route of flight. The briefer also informed the pilot that flight under visual flight rules (VFR) was not recommended; however, the pilot elected to depart under VFR. Although no radar data exists for the flight, the location of the accident site was consistent with the pilot having flown the airplane toward the Talladega National Forest, an area where the pilot frequently flew. After the pilot failed to arrive at his destination, a search was initiated, and the wreckage was located on October 11, 2006, at 1340, on Burgess Peak, at an elevation of 1,787 feet mean sea level. The airplane first impacted the top of a tree on the south side of Burgess Peak on a 300-degree heading. This heading coincides with the heading the pilot would have been flying when he departed the Auburn-Opelika Airport, indicating the pilot was on his intended heading and had control of the airplane at the time of the first tree impact. A review of the weather briefing the pilot received from Flight Service prior to his departure, revealed that the airplane likely encountered instrument meteorological conditions and near zero visibility at the altitude of the accident site. Examination of the airplane found no preimpact mechanical failure or malfunctions that would have prevented the airplane from operating properly.
Probable cause
The pilot's continued flight from VMC into IMC conditions which resulted in an in-flight collision with rising terrain.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ATL07FA005
- Event ID
- 20061017X01525
- Case number
- ATL07FA005
- 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: f026284351db8dd984037b3f4d06a684ae89681d2fe41f2992e114e72d5d1bbb; retrieved 2026-09-20T17:02:03.214Z.