CEN21LA401 · Bulfer James G GENESIS
Bulfer James G GENESIS · Accident: loss of control in flight on approach
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN21LA401
- 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
- 0
- 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
Bulfer James G GENESIS
- Aircraft type
- Bulfer James GENESIS
- 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
- N105BJ
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 25 years (built 1996)
- 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
- Approach · VFR pattern base
- 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
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Aircraft › Aircraft oper/perf/capability
- Aircraft › Aircraft power plant
- 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 and passenger were conducting a local personal flight in the experimental amateur-built airplane. While on the base leg of the traffic pattern, the engine’s drive belt failed and was ejected from the airplane. During the ensuing forced landing, the pilot allowed the airspeed to decay, and the airplane experienced an aerodynamic stall and descended into trees, which resulted in substantial damage to the wings, fuselage, and empennage. The airplane’s maintenance records revealed that the drive belt was last replaced about 20 years ago. The pilot had completed a maintenance inspection about 2 months before the accident and a preflight inspection before the flight; he did not notice anything wrong with the drive belt during the inspections. There were no other mechanical malfunctions or anomalies with the airplane that would have precluded normal operation.
Probable cause
The pilot’s failure to maintain airspeed during a forced landing, which resulted in the airplane exceeding its critical angle of attack and a subsequent aerodynamic stall. Contributing to the accident was the loss of power due to the failure of the engine’s drive belt.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN21LA401
- Event ID
- 20210907103804
- Case number
- CEN21LA401
- 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: ca49511a9c02f8c9e1834c33b4f3cce107a7e30a07c044b69de082cb1e930631; retrieved 2026-09-16T14:29:28.381Z.