ATL96FA123 · Burkhart Grob G-115D
SunQuest Aviation Burkhart Grob G-115D · Accident: airframe, component or system failure while maneuvering
From North Palm Beach County General Aviation Airport (F45) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ATL96FA123
- 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
- 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
Burkhart Grob G-115D
- Aircraft type
- Grob G-115
- 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
- N234VW
- Operator
- Sunquest Aviation
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From North Palm Beach County General Aviation Airport (F45), West Palm Beach, FLTo 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
- Airframe, component or system failure
- 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
- Flight control, rudder surface › Flutter
- Other maintenance personnel › Maintenance, balancing, not corrected
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight was scheduled as an aerobatic flight, but no witnesses actually saw the airplane maneuvering. Hunters reported hearing the engine 'revving up' and saw pieces of the airplane falling to the ground. Wreckage was scattered over an area about 2400' long by 400' wide. Separated pieces of the airplane included: an 8' section of the left wing, pieces of the left and right elevators, and other debris from the empennage & canopy. The top portion of the rudder assembly was found about 2400' from the main wreckage. The left aileron was found intact, and it weighed 7.15 pounds; balance checks of the left aileron showed that its residual hinge moment was between +0.138 and +0.200 foot-pounds (trailing edge heavy), exceeding the Grob specification which ranges from -0.22 (leading edge heavy) to +0.074 foot-pounds (trailing edge heavy). A review of the aircraft maintenance logs revealed the airplane had been repainted, but the flight control surfaces had not been rebalanced. Manufacturing records showed that when the left aileron was originally installed, it weighed 6.40 pounds and had a residual hinge moment of +0.071 pounds. Estimates of the residual hinge moments of the other flight control surfaces, including the rudder, disclosed that they also exceeded Grob's trailing-edge-heavy service limits. Grob's flutter analysis, based on control connection stiffness, indicated potential rudder flutter under these conditions. Oxide deposits found on several of the elevator hinge contact surfaces evidenced disbonding/delamination.
Probable cause
failure of maintenance personnel to rebalance the flight controls after the airplane had been repainted, which resulted in rudder flutter and in-flight breakup of the airplane.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ATL96FA123
- Event ID
- 20001208X06414
- Case number
- ATL96FA123
- 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: 7b09e239ac7eb69ba465d56bc1c5255d70caa506be6742a48c3610ae11d866fa; retrieved 2026-09-20T23:12:57.708Z.