CEN11IA286 · Cessna 560XL
CitationShares Sales Cessna 560XL · Incident: flight control system malfunction/failure en route
From Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport (MSY) to San Antonio International Airport (SAT)
Narrative check · The NTSB narrative appears to contradict this record's location. Values are shown as recorded, not corrected; compare with the narrative.
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN11IA286
- 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
- Incident
- 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
Cessna 560XL
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 560
- 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
- N547CS
- Operator
- CitationShares Sales
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport (MSY), New Orleans, LATo San Antonio International Airport (SAT), San Antonio, TX
- 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
- Flight control system malfunction/failure
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- None
Cause areas
- Aircraft › Aircraft systems
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
During the initial climb and approaching the assigned altitude, the captain noticed an abnormal feel in the flight controls followed by the pitch trim annunciator light coming on. The captain disconnected the autopilot and felt the airplane’s nose immediately pitch up. The captain immediately corrected for the abnormal pressure and attempted to reduce the control forces via the electric and manual trim to no avail. The captain slowed the airplane to the speed at which it was trimmed and ran the checklist for a jammed elevator trim. The captain notified his company dispatch, declared an emergency with approach control, and landed the airplane uneventfully. A postincident examination showed that the elevator trim cable had failed due to fatigue. A laboratory examination showed slight wear on the individual cable strands. The cable had been installed at the time of manufacture and had accumulated 5,445.3 total hours. Following the examination, the airplane manufacturer determined that the cable required replacement with one made of improved rope wire material and issued a service bulletin requiring owners and operators to replace the elevator trim cable with the new cable within 300 hours or 6 months from receipt of the service bulletin.
Probable cause
The pitch trim control cable failed due to fatigue, rendering the elevator trim inoperative.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN11IA286
- Event ID
- 20110415X05045
- Case number
- CEN11IA286
- 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, damage. 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: c4717e583e711e5d5da522cc1ef5383c7ed96f2f1f3618b3273643f0e963dd46; retrieved 2026-09-15T16:03:53.605Z.