CEN16WA088 · SOCATA TB20
SOCATA TB20 · Accident: loss of control in flight en route
From Muchamiel Airfield (LEMU) to Aeródromo de los Oteros (LEOS)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN16WA088
- 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
- Unknown · led by another country; figures from NTSB notifications
- API-reported fatalities
- 4 · 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
- Unknown
- WeatherVisual meteorological conditions (VMC): good enough to fly by looking outside. Instrument conditions (IMC): cloud or low visibility, flying by instruments. Glossary
- Not recorded
SOCATA TB20
- Aircraft type
- Socata TB20
- 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
- EC-ESK
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Muchamiel Airfield (LEMU), AlicanteTo Aeródromo de los Oteros (LEOS), León
- 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
- Not recorded
- 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
- Loss of control in flight
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Destroyed
Cause areas
No findings designated as a cause are recorded in the NTSB data yet.
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
On January 16, 2016, about 1532 coordinated universal time, a Socata TB-20 single engine airplane, serial number 747, registry EC-ESK, was destroyed after impacting terrain near Cuenca, Spain, during cruise flight. The pilot and three passengers were fatally injured. The airplane had departed from Alicante, Spain, and was enroute to León, Spain.
The accident investigation is under the jurisdiction and control of the government of Spain. This report is for information purposes only and contains only information released by or obtained from the government of Spain.
Further information pertaining to this accident may be obtained from:
Ministrio de Fomento - CIAIAC Fruela, 6 - 1ª floor 28011 MADRID - ESPAÑA
Verbatim NTSB factual narrative from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN16WA088
- Event ID
- 20160119X32338
- Case number
- CEN16WA088
- 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: 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: f61ecb64dc4b5edb24cf7ba3f613f49f70ae31d95a4523f046a82f599bccccbd; retrieved 2026-09-14T21:38:59.020Z.