CEN21LA132 · Beech B100
N312MB Beech B100 · Accident en route
From Alamogordo White Sands Regional Airport (KALM) to Dallas Executive Airport (KRBD)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN21LA132
- 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
- Event fatalities
- Unknown
- 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 B100
- Aircraft type
- Beechcraft 100
- 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
- N312MB
- Operator
- N312MB
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Alamogordo White Sands Regional Airport (KALM), Alamogordo, NMTo Dallas Executive Airport (KRBD), Dallas, TX
- Aircraft age
- About 40 years (built 1981)
- 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
- En route · cruise
- 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
- Miscellaneous/other
- 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 structures
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
About an hour after departure, while the airplane was in cruise flight, the pilot and passenger heard a “cracking noise” and noticed that the right windshield had cracked. The windshield remained in place and pressurization was not lost. The pilot notified the air traffic controller that he had a cracked windshield and diverted to a nearby airport. The airplane landed uneventfully and examination revealed substantial cracking damage to the right-side windshield inner pane.
The windshield was disposed of before further testing could be performed to determine the failure mode.
Probable cause
The failure of the right-side window inner pane for reasons that could not be determined based on available evidence.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN21LA132
- Event ID
- 20210219102650
- Case number
- CEN21LA132
- 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, coordinates, cause areas. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2021-02-18.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 6bafb68c3e6426b24f1674028e821629278e3c3d6c47a6aca60f4d816970ee72; retrieved 2026-09-16T13:43:31.988Z.