CEN09CA136 · Beech 19 A
Beech 19 A · Accident: structural icing en route
From Purdue University Airport (LAF) to South Bend International Airport (SBN)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN09CA136
- 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 19 A
- Aircraft type
- Beechcraft 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
- N6509T
- Operator
- Brian A McMillen · private individual
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Purdue University Airport (LAF), Lafayette, INTo South Bend International Airport (SBN), South Bend, IN
- 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
- 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
- Structural icing
- 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
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
Prior to the night flight, the pilot obtained a "full, low-level weather briefing" and filed an instrument flight rules flight plan. Shortly after departure, the pilot encountered icing conditions and began to experience a severe vibration in the aircraft flight controls at 5,000 feet mean sea level (msl). The pilot elected to return to the departure airport. During the instrument approach to land, the airplane continued to accumulate ice on the airframe, and continued toward the terrain in a 1,500 feet per minute descent. At 1,750 feet msl, the airplane "broke out of the clouds with the windscreen completely covered with ice." Subsequently, the airplane impacted the terrain approximately 40 feet short of the runway and skidded to a stop on the runway, resulting in substantial damage to the airplane. Examination of the airplane's systems and powerplant revealed no anomalies that would have precluded normal operation. The airplane's wings and windscreen had approximately 1 inch of ice on the respective surfaces. The pilot reported that icing conditions were not forecasted or reported prior to his flight.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadvertent encounter with icing conditions during initial climb. Contributing to the accident were the lack of visibility during the landing due to an ice covered windscreen, and the structural ice that adversely affected the flight characteristics of the airplane.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN09CA136
- Event ID
- 20090120X13218
- Case number
- CEN09CA136
- 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: local date, investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2009-01-18.
- API snapshot SHA-256: b2837506b6f41547626fe08ed960a9042422a9c61871bdae12a83e2d980a1990; retrieved 2026-09-15T10:42:10.314Z.