CEN10CA540 · Beech E-90
Sundance Farms Beech E-90 · Accident: ground collision
From Ontario Municipal Airport (ONO) to City of Colorado Springs Municipal Airport (COS)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN10CA540
- 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
Beech E-90
- Aircraft type
- Beechcraft E-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
- N16LH
- Operator
- Sundance Farms
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Ontario Municipal Airport (ONO), Ontario, ORTo City of Colorado Springs Municipal Airport (COS), Colorado Springs, CO
- 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
- Post-impact
- 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
- Ground collision
- 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
- Aircraft › Aircraft systems
- Personnel issues › Psychological
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
Following a night landing, the pilot taxied to the ramp and was marshaled into a parking space by ground crew personnel. The pilot stopped the twin-engine airplane and set the parking brake before continuing with other checklist items. Unbeknownst to the pilot, the airplane began to roll forward until it impacted a tug and ground power unit, located approximately 25 feet across the ramp. During the impact, the nose landing gear collapsed and the nose of the airplane came to rest on the rear of the tug, resulting in substantial damage to the fuselage. A postaccident examination of the airplane revealed no mechanical malfunctions or failures that would have precluded normal operation.
Probable cause
The pilot’s failure to ensure that the airplane’s parking brake was properly set before diverting his attention to other tasks.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN10CA540
- Event ID
- 20100916X80055
- Case number
- CEN10CA540
- 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, coordinates. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2010-09-05.
- API snapshot SHA-256: b5f9b428860a958ae99d7f96e06638ebdd4235aab116b3328fc57625f19bcc60; retrieved 2026-09-15T15:14:05.852Z.