CHI97LA170 · Waco YMF
Waco YMF · Accident: loss of control on ground/water during landing
From Crystal Airport (MIC) to D33
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI97LA170
- 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
Waco YMF
- Aircraft type
- Waco YMF
- 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
- N820MM
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Crystal Airport (MIC), Minneapolis, MNTo D33
- 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
- Landing · landing roll
- 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 on ground/water
- 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
- Pilot in command › Directional control, not maintained
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot landed the airplane on runway 13. The airplane weathervaned to the right, and the pilot allowed it to exit the runway. In the area off the runway, the airplane impacted a ditch and nosed over. The pilot said he elected to land the airplane on runway 13 due to the indication of the windsock. He said that eyewitnesses approached him after the accident and said the windsock did not indicate the actual wind condition; they told him that the wind was from the northwest at 15 knots. About 5 minutes before the accident, a weather station (36 nautical miles southwest of the accident site) was reporting winds of 230 degrees at 6 knots with gusts to 16 knots. The same station recorded winds of 170 at 3 knots, 15 minutes after the accident.
Probable cause
failure of the pilot to maintain directional control of the airplane. Factors relating to the accident were: the gusty wind condition and the ditch.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI97LA170
- Event ID
- 20001208X08083
- Case number
- CHI97LA170
- 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: 8bd122cb90c5f384137d6b6b31d6c76d8861f924e60bdad8a18570b796d52559; retrieved 2026-09-22T19:28:12.101Z.