Wiggins Airways Beech 99 A accident
Beech 99 A · Accident: turbulence encounter on approach
From Manchester-Boston Regional Airport (MHT) to Knox County Regional Airport (RKD)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA16LA137
- 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
- Charter & commuter
- WeatherVisual meteorological conditions (VMC): good enough to fly by looking outside. Instrument conditions (IMC): cloud or low visibility, flying by instruments. Glossary
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
Beech 99 A
- Aircraft type
- Beechcraft 99
- 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
- N198WA
- Operator
- Wiggins Airways
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Manchester-Boston Regional Airport (MHT), Manchester, NHTo Knox County Regional Airport (RKD), Rockland, ME
- Aircraft age
- About 46 years (built 1970)
- 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 135: Air Taxi & Commuter
- 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 · IFR final approach
- 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
- Turbulence encounter
- 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
- Environmental issues › Conditions/weather/phenomena
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The commercial pilot was conducting a nonscheduled cargo flight. The pilot reported that, as the airplane was descending on an instrument approach, it encountered continuous light-to-moderate turbulence. As the airplane descended through about 2,000 ft mean sea level at an airspeed of 130 knots, it encountered severe turbulence, and the pilot subsequently executed a missed approach and chose to divert to an alternate airport. The airplane continued to encounter light-to-moderate turbulence en route to the alternate airport, and the pilot landed the airplane uneventfully.
Postaccident examination of the airplane revealed that the airframe had sustained substantial damage during the flight. Although there were multiple AIRMETs for widespread moderate turbulence and low-level windshear, there were no pilot reports of, nor SIGMETs forecasting, severe turbulence at the time the pilot received her preflight weather briefing.
Probable cause
The airplane’s encounter with isolated severe turbulence, which resulted in substantial airframe damage.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA16LA137
- Event ID
- 20160323X61831
- Case number
- ERA16LA137
- 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: c60334e8db90411321c38180c054867c06314b6dc4cb252473ba5f408b374517; retrieved 2026-09-16T03:14:05.944Z.