NYC95FA212 · Piper PA-18A-150
Piper PA-18A-150 · Accident: loss of control in flight while maneuvering
From Ocean City Municipal Airport (26N) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC95FA212
- 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
- 1 · 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
Piper PA-18A-150
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-18
- 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
- N9374D
- Operator
- Scott Higgins
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Ocean City Municipal Airport (26N), Ocean City, NJTo 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
- Maneuvering
- 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
- Loss of control in flight
- Also codedOther events the NTSB coded in the sequence, such as a wire strike after a loss of power. Flight Findings uses them for its kinds of event. Glossary
- Stall; Tree(s)
- 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
- Pilot in command › Airspeed, not maintained
- Pilot in command › Stall, inadvertent
Not plotted · Location withheld: coordinates are missing, conflicting, invalid, or have no accepted acquisition method. No substitute location has been invented.
NTSB narrative
The airplane approached the field, for the first banner pick up of the day, with no indications of difficulty. The pilot made contact with the pick-up loop, entered a climb, followed by a push over at approximately 200 feet AGL. The airplane lost some altitude and regained forward speed. The pilot released the banner, and the airplane began to pitch upward, followed by a continually increasing bank/roll to the right. The airplane rolled to a full 90 degrees, until it impacted with a tree. A witness stated, 'the aircraft's engine noise sounded normal...I then heard him pull the power...very shortly after I heard the sound of impact....' At the time of the accident, the pilot had approximately 500 hours total flight time, and 60 hours in this make and model airplane. The pilot was employed by the operator about two months earlier and he had approximately 40 hours flight time in banner towing operations. The pilot next to pick up a banner stated that the winds were 'light' out of the north and there was 'no turbulence.'
Probable cause
Failure of the pilot to maintain adequate airspeed during pull-up from a banner pickup, which resulted in a stall and collision with trees before recovering from the stall.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC95FA212
- Event ID
- 20001207X04566
- Case number
- NYC95FA212
- 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: 9b56f51e9245ff2e36da04bdc6b1f82e6451dbcc98740c2348b3215521653483; retrieved 2026-09-20T23:38:18.671Z.