ERA22FA137 · Beech 35 C33
Beech 35 C33 · Accident: loss of control in flight while maneuvering
From Doylestown Airport (DYL) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA22FA137
- 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
- 2 · 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 35 C33
- 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
- N6129V
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Doylestown Airport (DYL), Doylestown, PATo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 57 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
The flight instructor and the pilot receiving instruction were conducting a flight in an airplane that the pilot receiving instruction owned, and the purpose of the accident flight was to prepare him for the commercial pilot practical examination. About 30 minutes after takeoff, the airplane was maneuvering at an altitude of about 1,600 ft above ground level. The airplane then entered a left spin and descended toward the ground, impacting a residential street.
A witness stated that he heard a single engine airplane overhead and thought the airplane’s loud engine sound did not match its slow airspeed, which meant to him that the airplane was most likely in a steep climb to practice a stall. The witness looked up again and saw the airplane diving almost straight down and twisting toward the ground.
Examination of the wreckage revealed no preimpact mechanical malfunctions. Review of automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) data revealed that the airplane’s maneuvers during the final portion of flight were conducted below its flaps-up, idle power stall speed and were twice briefly below the flaps-down stall speed. During the final 30 seconds of flight, the airplane rolled rapidly to the left when engine noise was reduced. The airplane’s rapid left roll and loss of altitude were consistent with an aerodynamic stall. Thus, the pilot who was flying (which could not be determined based on the available evidence) allowed the airplane’s critical angle of attack to be exceeded, resulting in a loss of airplane control. Toxicological testing detected ethanol and metoprolol in the flight instructor’s specimens. The most likely source of the ethanol was postmortem production; therefore, the identified ethanol did not contribute to the circumstances of the accident. Although direct effects from the flight instructor’s use of metoprolol likely did not contribute to the events, the available evidence precluded a determination of whether effects from the flight instructor’s recent heart attack and underlying heart disease contributed to the circumstances of the accident. In addition, if the flight instructor had experienced a medical event during the flight, should have been reasonable able to control the airplane.
Probable cause
The pilots’ exceedance of the airplane’s critical angle of attack while practicing maneuvers during an instructional flight, which resulted in an aerodynamic stall and and a loss of airplane control.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA22FA137
- Event ID
- 20220225104702
- Case number
- ERA22FA137
- 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: 932eebfd285b1e733212697064fc5e5b1552dd18d61ef1b9a1147d55f38f6c4e; retrieved 2026-09-15T07:41:30.621Z.