CEN19FA323 · Beech V35
Beech V35 · Accident: loss of control in flight while maneuvering
From Windsong Farms Heliport (0OH7) to Madison County Airport (UYF)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN19FA323
- 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 V35
- Aircraft type
- Beechcraft 35
- 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
- N5438U
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Windsong Farms Heliport (0OH7), Piqua, OHTo Madison County Airport (UYF), London, OH
- Aircraft age
- About 52 years (built 1967)
- 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 · low-altitude flying
- 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
- Environmental issues › Conditions/weather/phenomena
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot was conducting a cross-country, personal flight. He had departed from his private airstrip and was on final approach for landing at his destination airport. One witness stated that it appeared that “the pilot overshot the runway and was banking back towards the east to make another approach.” The airplane banked too steeply and then “dove” toward the ground. He added that the pilot might have been “blinded” by the rising sun “as he banked and looked back east.” Another witness reported seeing the airplane “flying parallel to the highway” with it wings “perpendicular to the ground.” After the airplane flew over the highway, it banked “hard to the left and was too low to recover.” He then noticed a “flash” as if the right aileron had reflected the sunlight and the pilot was trying to bank right to level off but had insufficient airspeed “to correct.” The eastbound witness also had a dashboard camera, which captured the airplane's landing approach. The video showed the airplane fly east, parallel to the highway, then fly over the highway to the south, bank to the east, and then descend out of sight. The sun was about 2° above the horizon at an azimuth of about 89° at the time of the accident, and given the airplane’s position, it would have been shining directly into the pilot's eyes. The airplane impacted terrain about 520 ft west of the approach end of the landing runway and 50 ft north of the extended runway centerline. Postimpact fire consumed most of the cabin, instrument panel, fuselage, and right wing. Postaccident examination of the airplane revealed that the main landing gear were down and that the flaps were set to 20° down. There were no mechanical anomalies with the airplane that would have precluded normal operations. Based on the available evidence, it is likely that the pilot exceeded the airplane’s critical angle of attack while maneuvering toward the final leg of the traffic pattern and facing the rising sun after overshooting the runway, which resulted in an aerodynamic stall at too low of an altitude to recover.
Probable cause
The pilot’s exceedance of the airplane’s critical angle of attack while maneuvering toward the final leg of the traffic pattern and facing the rising sun, which resulted in a subsequent aerodynamic stall at too low an altitude to recover.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN19FA323
- Event ID
- 20190918X85320
- Case number
- CEN19FA323
- 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: 2dad9e82ee7d7d95cac8ada5b437f2b0aed603f61b22fedb410dd8480f8ab61f; retrieved 2026-09-15T07:05:42.195Z.