FTW96FA200 · North American HARVARD MK II HARVARD MK
North American HARVARD MK II HARVARD MK · Accident: in flight collision with terrain/water while maneuvering
From Lafayette Regional Airport (LFT) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- FTW96FA200
- 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
North American HARVARD MK II HARVARD MK
- Aircraft type
- North American HARVARD MK
- 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
- N2755Z
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Lafayette Regional Airport (LFT)To 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
- In flight collision with terrain/water
- 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 › Altitude, not maintained
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
During an air show performance, the pilot made a low pass, pulled up, and entered a roll to the right. As the airplane reached the inverted position, there was hesitation, then the nose dropped, and the airplane began descending, while continuing to roll to the right. The airplane impacted the ground upright with the left wing low. Examination of the airplane and engine revealed no evidence of any mechanical discrepancies. The pilot was an experienced air show performer, who had given more than 50 air show performances in the accident make and model of airplane. He had approximately 30 hours flight time in the accident airplane.
Probable cause
failure of the pilot to maintain adequate airspeed and/or altitude, while performing aerobatic flight.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record FTW96FA200
- Event ID
- 20001208X05745
- Case number
- FTW96FA200
- 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: 3b8f2e1334e21bac04214367e81031a37e39b04ae11e0a61f52b029b5d4852d6; retrieved 2026-09-20T23:22:02.562Z.