DFW07CA104 · Air Tractor AT-602
Shelby Air Service Air Tractor AT-602 · Accident: on ground/water collision with terrain/water during landing
From Benoit, MS to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- DFW07CA104
- 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
Air Tractor AT-602
- Aircraft type
- Air Tractor AT-602
- 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
- N629LA
- Operator
- Shelby Air Service
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Benoit, MSTo 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 137: Agricultural
- 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 · landing roll
- 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
- On ground/water collision with terrain/water
- 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 › Clearance, not attained
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The right spray boom from the tailwheel equipped agricultural airplane became entangled with tall wheat while landing on a narrow gravel airstrip. The 2,236-hour commercial pilot, who reported having accumulated a total of 128 hours in the same make and model of airplane, lost control of the airplane resulting in a ground-loop. The aft section of the fuselage sustained structural damage. The turbine powered airplane came to rest in an upright position and the pilot was able to exit unassisted. The wheat was displaced approximately four feet from the airstrip's left edge and was growing adjacent to the right edge. Earlier that day, the pilot reported that he had observed wheat entangled in the right spray boom following two previous landings on the same airstrip. An examination of the airplane's right wheel at the accident site revealed that it was free to rotate and that the right brake was not dragging. The wind velocity at the time of the accident was reported between 1 to 3 knots.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain clearance with the crops which resulted in a ground loop. A contributing factor was the narrow airstrip
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DFW07CA104
- Event ID
- 20070529X00646
- Case number
- DFW07CA104
- 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: 6de268a0ab950019085026f0b6de05cba3a5cd08824964e7f9c954b73f34a5c1; retrieved 2026-09-22T03:51:47.382Z.