CEN26LA077 · Beech B35
Beech B35 · Accident: aerodynamic stall/spin during initial climb
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN26LA077
- 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 B35
- 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
- N5174C
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 76 years (built 1950)
- 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
- Initial climb
- 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
- Aerodynamic stall/spin
- 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
- 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
In a telephone interview, the pilot reported that he was taking off from a private dirt strip when the accident happened. He said that he was departing to the south and the takeoff was normal until the airplane was above the level of the treetops that bordered the airstrip. Once the airplane reached that altitude, it stopped accelerating and drifted left, the left wing dropped, and the airplane descended into the trees. The pilot stated that he believed he experienced windshear with the wind changing from a quartering headwind to a quartering tailwind after clearing the trees. When asked, the pilot reported that there were no preaccident mechanical failures or malfunctions with the airplane that would have precluded normal operation. The nearest aviation weather reporting station was located at the Stephens County Airport (BKD), Breckenridge, Texas, about 13 nautical miles northwest of the accident and reported wind from 280° at 7 knots about the time of the accident.
Probable cause
The pilot’s exceedance of the airplane’s critical angle of attack during initial climb after takeoff, leading to an aerodynamic stall and impact with trees.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN26LA077
- Event ID
- 20260106202250
- Case number
- CEN26LA077
- 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: 9eb694aa215230c2ddcef6914be2adb2a160220955b5f7063ccb30e8a7c1ff74; retrieved 2026-09-16T20:38:53.863Z.