FTW97FA002 · Bell EAA BIPLANE P EAA BIPLAN
Bell EAA BIPLANE P EAA BIPLAN · Accident: in flight collision with terrain/water while maneuvering
From No airport to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- FTW97FA002
- 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
Bell EAA BIPLANE P EAA BIPLAN
- Aircraft type
- Bell EAA BIPLANE
- 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
- N145DB
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From No airportTo 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 › Altitude/clearance, not maintained
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
Witnesses said the biplane flew over the farm airstrip at an estimated altitude of 300 to 400 feet. One witness stated that the pilot started 'what appeared to be an aileron roll, but stopped halfway and peeled off to the left in a shallow dive but didn't have enough altitude to pull out.' Another witness said that the pilot 'began rolling the aircraft right wing down about 3/4 of a roll then the front of the plane dropped' and disappeared from his view. The biplane struck the ground about 350 feet south of runway 27 on a westerly heading. Ground scars from impact were found over a 150 foot area. An investigation disclosed no evidence of a preimpact malfunction or failure of the airframe, flight controls, engine, or propeller. The 739-hour pilot had recently graduated from an aerial application school and was employed as a first season aerial applicator. He had previously flown the biplane three times and had an estimated 3.0 hours of flight time in this make/model of aircraft.
Probable cause
failure of the pilot to maintain sufficient altitude/clearance above the terrain, while performing a low altitude maneuver. A factor relating to the accident was the pilot's lack of familiarity with this make and model of aircraft.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record FTW97FA002
- Event ID
- 20001208X06866
- Case number
- FTW97FA002
- 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: ec9da53dbec97db0030b8a3f515903f0503085d70e22f23155d9613b8317fed5; retrieved 2026-09-20T23:10:51.568Z.