NYC08LA007 · Boeing A75N
Boeing A75N · Accident: in flight collision with object during initial climb
From Flying Circus Aerodrome (3VA3) to Flying Circus Aerodrome (3VA3)
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC08LA007
- 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
Boeing A75N
- Aircraft type
- Boeing A75
- 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
- N66004
- Operator
- John D. King · private individual
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Flying Circus Aerodrome (3VA3), Midland, VATo Flying Circus Aerodrome (3VA3)
- 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
- In flight collision with object
- 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 › Performance data, not calculated
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot of the 1941 Boeing A75N (Stearman) reported that the airplane powered up as expected, "accelerated normally, [and] perhaps [took] a little longer than usual on the takeoff roll." The airplane lifted off the grass strip but would not climb before it struck trees and wires and was destroyed by a postcrash fire. The pilot said that there were no deficiencies in the airplane's performance and handling. When asked what may have caused the accident, the pilot stated that he didn't know but that the high density-altitude, the airplane's high gross weight, and a tailwind "didn't help." Although the performance charts provided by the airplane's owner were for an airplane with a lower gross weight and contained no tailwind adjustment data, the pilot reported that he had never seen the charts and that he did not conduct any performance planning before the takeoff.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to conduct performance planning before takeoff.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC08LA007
- Event ID
- 20071106X01731
- Case number
- NYC08LA007
- 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: 9a6d9b13c324c1d80fc6ba66d46593289cfccc8c0dd35c1075913e0588277bcc; retrieved 2026-09-21T18:22:33.679Z.