NYC08CA102 · Beech C90-1
Beech C90-1 · Accident: turbulence encounter en route
From Tupelo Regional Airport (TUP) to Jack Edwards National Airport (JKA)
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC08CA102
- 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
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
Beech C90-1
- 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
- N901JB
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Tupelo Regional Airport (TUP), Tupelo, MSTo Jack Edwards National Airport (JKA), Gulf Shores, AL
- 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
- Defining eventThe 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
- Turbulence encounter
- 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
- Environmental issues › Conditions/weather/phenomena
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The Beech C90-1 was on autopilot, level, and between cloud layers, at 17,000 feet. The pilot saw some buildups ahead, and to avoid the largest one, asked air traffic control for a "slight turn" and a climb to flight level (FL) 190, which was approved. Nothing on the weather radar or stormscope indicated any severe weather ahead. Upon entering the clouds, in a right climbing turn, the airplane "almost immediately" encountered severe turbulence, and was "thrown inverted" in a nose-down attitude. As the airplane gained airspeed, the pilot pulled the throttles to idle and pushed the propeller levers full forward. He then rolled the airplane upright and had to pull the yoke "extremely hard" to recover from the dive. The event began about 17,500 feet, and the recovery was complete at 10,500 feet. The pilot then climbed the airplane to FL 190, and completed the rest of the flight uneventfully. On the subsequent preflight inspection, the pilot found wrinkling in wing sheet metal.
Probable cause
An inadvertent encounter with in-cloud turbulence.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC08CA102
- Event ID
- 20080322X00367
- Case number
- NYC08CA102
- Dataset
- full-current
- Source SHA-256
- 5cf380f0061817c0331a6b2d8cc7e0ee3a79bea469a1001dc5c10e56f35f5ab3
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: c57dea12aa12ff737c87e2ae4272ed7bf66581ceda9a455a1cdabf38a19a890b; retrieved 2026-09-15T09:27:27.532Z.