ANC99LA048 · Elam RAF 2000-GTX RAF 2000-G
Elam RAF 2000-GTX RAF 2000-G · Accident: in flight encounter with weather during initial climb
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC99LA048
- 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
Elam RAF 2000-GTX RAF 2000-G
- Aircraft type
- Elam RAF-2000
- Category
- Gyroplane
- 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
- N95WE
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- Not recorded
- 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
- First occurrenceThe 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
- In flight encounter with weather
- 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
- Pilot in command › Compensation for wind conditions, inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The private pilot was departing on runway 15 in a gyroplane. He said that as the gyroplane climbed to about 400 feet above the runway, strong winds were encountered from the southeast. The pilot stated: 'I just could not keep it from sinking, and I had to put it down.' The pilot said that during a forced landing in an open field the gyroplane landed hard, and the fuselage and main rotor system sustained substantial damage. The pilot holds a private pilot certificate with a single-engine land rating, and did not hold a rotorcraft-gyroplane rating. The pilot stated that he did obtain an instructor's logbook endorsement for solo flight in gyroplanes. The pilot reported that after the accident a bent and fractured cyclic control tube was found lying next to the gyroplane wreckage. The cyclic control tube was sent to the NTSB's Materials Laboratory for examination. A Safety Board metallurgist reported that the fracture surfaces exhibited features consistent with an overstress separation. He added that the fracture face was consistent with the direction of the tube bending. The closest official weather observation station is Palmer. On April 18, at 1153, an Aviation Routine Weather Report (METAR) was reporting, in part: Wind, 170 degrees at 7 knots.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadequate compensation for wind conditions. A factor associated with the accident was a downdraft.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC99LA048
- Event ID
- 20001205X00406
- Case number
- ANC99LA048
- Dataset
- historical-pre2008
- Source SHA-256
- 89e2df6d848e7ab3b42e7d7c7a03ff403303057a26ca04c95b3ea67201c3ce74
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. 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: 0b624e211aa80920d28099e63e843f8f1af6cd5c680c24144e24679b2f693600; retrieved 2026-09-22T15:26:32.201Z.