ERA12FA120 · Cessna 441
Cessna 441 · Accident: aerodynamic stall/spin on approach
From Long Beach International Airport (LGB) to York Airport (THV)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA12FA120
- 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
- 1 · 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 441
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 441
- 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
- N48BS
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Long Beach International Airport (LGB), Long Beach, CATo York Airport (THV), Thomasville, PA
- 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
- Approach · VFR pattern base
- 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
- Aerodynamic stall/spin
- 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 oper/perf/capability
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
Toward the end of a 6 hour, 20 minute flight, during a night visual approach, the pilot flew the airplane to a left traffic pattern downwind leg. At some point, he lowered the landing gear and set the flaps to 30 degrees. He turned the airplane to a left base leg, and after doing so, was heard on the common traffic frequency stating that he had an "engine out." The airplane then passed through the final leg course, the pilot called "base to final," and the airplane commenced a right turn while maintaining altitude. The angle of bank was then observed to increase to where the airplane's wings became vertical, then inverted, and the airplane rolled into a near-vertical descent, hitting the ground upright in a right spin. Subsequent examination of the airplane and engines revealed that the right engine was not powered at impact, and the propeller from that engine was not in feather. No mechanical anomalies could be found with the engine that could have resulted in its failure. The right fuel tank was breeched; however, fuel calculations, confirmed by some fuel found in the right fuel tank as well as fuel found in the engine fuel filter housing, indicated that fuel exhaustion did not occur. Unknown is why the pilot did not continue through a left turn descent onto the final approach leg toward airport, which would also have been a turn toward the operating engine. The pilot had a communication device capable of voice calls, texting, e-mail and alarms, among other functions. E-mails were sent by the device until 0323, and an alarm sounded at 0920. It is unknown if or how much pilot fatigue might have influenced the outcome.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain minimum control airspeed after a loss of power to the right engine, which resulted in an uncontrollable roll into an inadvertent stall/spin. Contributing to the accident was the failure of the airplane's right engine for reasons that could not be determined because no preexisting mechanical anomalies were found, and the pilot's subsequent turn toward that inoperative engine while maintaining altitude.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA12FA120
- Event ID
- 20111222X05125
- Case number
- ERA12FA120
- 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. 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: 2932b1ae931d61c997fe417406a1aaf486bf29d74073f815af566e0d4639fe45; retrieved 2026-09-13T22:05:44.576Z.