CEN16LA250 · Bellanca 7ECA
Bellanca 7ECA · Accident: nose over/nose down during takeoff
From Vicksburg, MS to Morehouse Memorial Airport (BQP)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN16LA250
- 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
Bellanca 7ECA
- Aircraft type
- Bellanca 7
- 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
- N87083
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Vicksburg, MSTo Morehouse Memorial Airport (BQP), Bastrap, LA
- Aircraft age
- About 42 years (built 1974)
- 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
- Takeoff · rejected takeoff
- 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
- Nose over/nose down
- 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
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The private pilot reported that, during the attempted takeoff from the turf airstrip, the airplane was not at the expected airspeed three-quarters of the way down the runway, and he decided to abort the takeoff. The airplane became airborne momentarily as the pilot applied brakes and aft control input. Once the airplane settled, he was unable to stop it before it overran the end of the runway, and the airplane then impacted two ditches, nosed over, and came to rest inverted. The pilot was departing with a left crosswind and during high density altitude conditions. It is likely that the density altitude coupled with the turf runway increased the distance required to attain the necessary speed for takeoff. Further, the slight balloon of the airplane as the pilot tried to stop it increased the required distance to stop the airplane, and insufficient runway was remaining to stop the airplane.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain airplane control during the aborted takeoff, which resulted in it becoming airborne momentarily and then over running the runway.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN16LA250
- Event ID
- 20160705X24026
- Case number
- CEN16LA250
- 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: 0473ac94b0b53104fcf81e3345ec9a06af963de06a8de52eea8503e496a5983a; retrieved 2026-09-16T03:36:32.878Z.