CEN16LA119 · Beech 95 C55 UNDESIGNAT
Beech 95 C55 UNDESIGNAT · Accident: runway excursion during landing
From Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport (BHM) to Casey Municipal Airport (1H8)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN16LA119
- 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 95 C55 UNDESIGNAT
- Aircraft type
- Beechcraft 95
- 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
- N88FL
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport (BHM), Birmingham, ALTo Casey Municipal Airport (1H8), Casey, IL
- Aircraft age
- About 50 years (built 1966)
- 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
- Landing
- 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
- Runway excursion
- 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
- Not determined › Not determined
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
- Personnel issues › Psychological
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot was conducting a cross-country flight in a multiengine airplane; he entered the pattern on the crosswind leg and set the mixture and power for landing and extended the flaps. He reported that the right engine "sputtered" while the airplane was abeam the runway threshold. The pilot immediately checked the power levers, pushed the mixture controls to full. As he turned onto the base leg of the traffic pattern, the right engine lost power. He further reported that, during the turn to the final leg of the traffic pattern, the left engine also sputtered, and then experienced a total loss of power. The pilot extended the flaps to the final setting, lowered the landing gear, and pushed the airplane's nose over to "make the runway." The pilot said that he "flared then bounced, floated and bounced again." The airplane ran off the paved surface, flew over a ditch and touched down in a plowed field where all three landing gear collapsed.
Postaccident examination revealed that the airplane touched down on the 1,400-foot-long parallel taxiway, rather than the runway, and continued off the taxiway, where it came to rest. During recovery of the airplane from the accident site, 25 gallons of fuel was drained from each of the main fuel tanks. The airplane's engines were run on a test stand at the manufacturer's facility. Both engines exhibited normal operation through all power settings. No other system anomalies were found with the airplane.
It is likely the pilot, distracted by the reported loss of power on both engines, mistook the parallel taxiway for the runway. On touching down, he quickly ran out of hard surface and pulled the airplane back into the air. He subsequently touched down beyond the perimeter road about taxiway into soft ground, collapsing the landing gear and resulting in the damage to the airplane's forward fuselage and right wing.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadvertent landing on a taxiway after a reported loss of engine power in both engines, which resulted in an overrun of the paved surface. The reason for the loss of engine power could not be determined because a postaccident test run of the engines did not reveal any anomalies that would have precluded normal operation.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN16LA119
- Event ID
- 20160304X22545
- Case number
- CEN16LA119
- 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: 05b14255c1ef7952291dc7c99953630568108053a6f0d3561856b0fcf49405b9; retrieved 2026-09-16T03:12:11.479Z.