GAA16CA331 · Beech F33 A
Kansas State University Salina Beech F33 A · Accident: aerodynamic stall/spin during landing
From Salina Municipal Airport (SLN) to Salina Municipal Airport (SLN)
Event
- NTSB case
- GAA16CA331
- 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 F33 A
- Aircraft type
- Beechcraft 33
- 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
- N853KS
- Operator
- Kansas State University Salina
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Salina Municipal Airport (SLN), Salina, KSTo Salina Municipal Airport (SLN), Salina, KS
- Aircraft age
- About 23 years (built 1993)
- 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
- 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 › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight instructor reported that he and his student pilot had remained in the traffic pattern, and had been practicing short field landings and power off 180 degree accuracy turns. The flight instructor further reported that he instructed his student to perform a short field landing for their sixth and final landing, and once "they had the runway made", he would take the flight controls. He intended to demonstrate how "ground effect plays a part in our landings and how one can use it to their advantage if you were in a situation where one would be short on a power off 180 accuracy landing or in a real world situation".
About 50 feet above the ground and over the runway threshold the flight instructor took the controls from the student pilot. He further reported that while he was talking to his student pilot about how "ground effect can extend your landing distance if you carry extra airspeed", he noticed that the pitch attitude was higher than normal and before he could add power or reduce the pitch attitude, the right wing "gave way" and impacted the ground, which resulted in substantial damage to the right aileron.
The pilot verified that there were no preimpact mechanical failures or malfunctions with the airframe or engine that would have precluded normal operation.
The Federal Aviation Administration has published the Airplane Flying Handbook FAA-H-8083-3A (2004). This handbook discusses stalls and states in part:
The key to stall awareness is the pilot's ability to visualize the wing's angle of attack in any particular circumstance, and thereby be able to estimate his/her margin of safety above stall. This is a learned skill that must be acquired early in flight training and carried through the pilot's entire flying career. The pilot must understand and appreciate factors such as airspeed, pitch attitude, load factor, relative wind, power setting, and aircraft configuration in order to develop a reasonably accurate mental picture of the wing's angle of attack at any particular time. It is essential to flight safety that a pilot takes into consideration this visualization of the wing's angle of attack prior to entering any flight maneuver.
Stall accidents usually result from an inadvertent stall at a low altitude in which a recovery was not accomplished prior to contact with the surface.
Probable cause
The flight instructor's exceedance of the airplane's critical angle of attack during landing, which resulted in an aerodynamic stall and a collision with terrain.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record GAA16CA331
- Event ID
- 20160627X93353
- Case number
- GAA16CA331
- 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: local date, investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2016-06-18.
- API snapshot SHA-256: d30ee1515f8ec38ab3e79824a8241aaeb64c9599e1b3ffb1c436d4ee73ea1e24; retrieved 2026-09-16T03:34:08.335Z.