CEN21LA174 · Beech 95-B55 (T42A)
Beech 95-B55 (T42A) · Accident: aircraft inspection event before flight
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN21LA174
- 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 95-B55 (T42A)
- Aircraft type
- Beechcraft 55
- 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
- N568P
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 43 years (built 1978)
- 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
- Prior to flight
- 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
- Aircraft inspection event
- 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 › Fluids/miscellaneous hardware
- 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
The pilot departed on a local flight with the towbar attached to the nose landing gear. When the pilot rotated the airplane for takeoff, he felt the left rudder pedal “slam to the floor,” and he could not depress the right rudder pedal, which resulted in a sustained adverse yaw condition. The airplane climbed and drifted left of the runway, so the pilot continued the climb to pattern altitude. During the climb, he saw the towbar attached to the nosewheel through a mirror on the left engine nacelle. The pilot circled the airport about 30 minutes while assistance arrived. During the last circle, as he was descending, the right engine lost power. The pilot recalled that the right fuel gauge showed “low,” and the left fuel gauge was about 1/2 full. The pilot began to crossfeed fuel to the right engine, but he was unsuccessful in getting the right engine to restart. The pilot was unable to maintain airspeed and altitude and was having difficulty maintaining directional control of the airplane, so he elected to land the airplane in an open field. The airplane sustained damage to the fuselage and right wing during the landing.
Although the airplane manual states that the crossfeed is to be used in level flight only, the pilot reported that fuel was being fed to the right fuel tank as evidenced by the fuel gauge indication increasing. The pilot reported the airplane’s altitude was a couple hundred feet above the ground when he turned the crossfeed on and this may have prevented him from having adequate time to restart the engine as he was occupied with trying to land the airplane.
Probable cause
The pilot’s failure to remove the towbar from the nose landing gear before takeoff, which resulted in a sustained adverse yaw condition, and his failure to adequately monitor the fuel system while circling the airport, which resulted in fuel starvation and loss of power to the right engine.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN21LA174
- Event ID
- 20210401102856
- Case number
- CEN21LA174
- 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, cause areas. 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: 0041e50bccf9d417389049638fb856af3a856ad28ca49d3c7aa3118794320206; retrieved 2026-09-16T13:55:00.736Z.