IAD96LA155 · Merritt ACRO SPORT II ACRO SPORT
Merritt ACRO SPORT II ACRO SPORT · Accident: total loss of engine power (non-mechanical) during initial climb
From Greater Cumberland Regional Airport (CBE) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- IAD96LA155
- 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
Merritt ACRO SPORT II ACRO SPORT
- Aircraft type
- Merritt ACRO SPORT
- 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
- N30803
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Greater Cumberland Regional Airport (CBE)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
- 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
- Total loss of engine power (non-mechanical)
- 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
- Fuel starvation
- 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
- Fluid, fuel › Starvation
- Pilot in command › Fuel boost pump selector position, improper
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot had flown the experimental airplane once previously for less than one hour. He took off on the active runway, and was one third the way down the 5,048-foot runway at an altitude between 150 to 200 feet when the engine sputtered and surged. The pilot lowered the nose to best glide airspeed when the engine began to run again. The pilot reestablished a climb attitude in order to gain altitude and to try to assess the situation. He elected to do a 180-degree turn and land on the departure runway in the opposite direction. The engine again lost power, and the pilot initiated a turn to line up with the runway. The airplane impacted at the intersection of two runways and slide off the runway onto the grass. The builder did not use an engine driven fuel pump as drawn in the experimental airplane schematics, but utilized an electric fuel pump with an on/off switch in the cockpit. The builder stated that he had briefed the pilot on his earlier flight on the utilization of the electric fuel pump for take off. The pilot could not recall if he used the electric fuel pump.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to select the electric fuel boost pump during take off which resulted in loss of engine power due to fuel starvation and the subsequent forced landing. A factor to this accident was the owner/builder alteration of the fuel system by installing electric fuel pump instead of a engine driven pump as depicted in the airplane's schematics.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record IAD96LA155
- Event ID
- 20001208X06763
- Case number
- IAD96LA155
- 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: 213171adcf57e93f47a52e7dcc23b8f27647fa11487fcd03433a8b30b20865d2; retrieved 2026-09-21T12:26:27.789Z.