CEN17FA005 · Beech D95A
Beech D95A · Accident: loss of control in flight while maneuvering
From Pearland Regional Airport (LVJ) to Pearland Regional Airport (LVJ)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN17FA005
- 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
- 1 · 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 D95A
- 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
- N76S
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Pearland Regional Airport (LVJ), Houston, TXTo Pearland Regional Airport (LVJ), Houston, TX
- Aircraft age
- About 51 years (built 1965)
- 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
- Maneuvering
- 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
- Aircraft › Aircraft oper/perf/capability
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
A flight instructor and private pilot receiving instruction departed on the accident flight to practice aerodynamic stalls in the multiengine airplane. After the accident, the pilot recalled that the instructor initiated an aerodynamic stall maneuver about 4,000 ft mean sea level, then recalled the instructor "cursing" the airplane when it would not recover from the stall. The pilot could not recall any further details of the accident flight. A witness about one 1 mile south of the accident site saw the airplane descending in a fully- developed right spin. Data retrieved from an onboard GPS unit revealed that the airplane entered a climb from about 4,000 ft, reaching a peak altitude of about 4,800 ft. The airplane then immediately entered a descent that continued until the end of the recorded data. Post-accident examination of the airplane revealed no mechanical malfunctions or anomalies that would have precluded normal operation.
Review of the flight instructor's logbooks indicated that he had accumulated over 9,800 total hours of flight experience, with over 4,600 hours in multiengine airplanes; however, he had only accumulated 16 hours in the 11 years before the accident. He had logged about 11 hours in the accident airplane, of which about 6 hours were as a flight instructor, all within the previous two months. His logbooks did not indicate that he had previously practiced aerodynamic stalls in the accident airplane; therefore, he was likely unfamiliar with the airplane's stall characteristics.
Following a series of fatal accidents in Beech Baron/Travel Air airplanes between 1978 and 1980, the National Transportation Safety Board issued safety recommendations to the Federal Aviation Administration, stating that these airplanes have a propensity for entering flat spins under high asymmetric power and low speed conditions; such conditions are frequently encountered during multiengine emergency (engine-out) training. It is likely that, while demonstrating aerodynamic stalls, the airplane entered a spin from which the flight instructor was unable to recover.
Probable cause
The flight instructor's loss of control during an aerodynamic stall demonstration, which resulted in an inadvertent spin from which he was unable to recover. Contributing to the accident was the flight instructor's lack of familiarity with the airplane's stall characteristics.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN17FA005
- Event ID
- 20161004X34956
- Case number
- CEN17FA005
- 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, 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: 00ac122dd1a66356db341eba640e6e6a7722b982ab53a9a681049742ac210dcc; retrieved 2026-09-14T22:01:02.412Z.