IAD98FA044 · Piper PA-20
Piper PA-20 · Accident: loss of control in flight during initial climb
From Birdsville Airport (BVI) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- IAD98FA044
- 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
Piper PA-20
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-20
- 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
- N2336A
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Birdsville Airport (BVI)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
- Loss of control in flight
- 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
- Stall
- 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 › Aircraft control, not maintained
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
A witness reported that the airplane departed the airport towards the west, with a tailwind. The airplane 'fishtailed' down the runway, and once airborne, the airplane's wings rocked back and forth several times before it went into a nose-high attitude. The left wing dropped, the airplane made a descending turn to the south, impacted an embankment and caught fire. The engine was heard running throughout the takeoff sequence. The pilot purchased the airplane two days prior to the accident, and had the previous owner fly with him, after the purchase, to familiarize him with the airplane. The accident airplane was the first tailwheel airplane without a stick that the pilot had flown. The pilot also reported to the previous owner that most of his flight experience had been in an Ercoupe that did not have rudders and flaps. The pilot had flown 9 times in the past 11 years, and had accumulated 3.1 hours of flight experience in the accident airplane. No pre-impact malfunction with the airplane or the engine was found.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain aircraft control, and his failure to attain adequate airspeed, which resulted in a stall. Contributing was the pilot's lack of familiarity with the airplane, and his misjudgment of wind information which resulted in a tailwind during takeoff.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record IAD98FA044
- Event ID
- 20001211X09876
- Case number
- IAD98FA044
- 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: 55ccea392d73ae6c9071412282b8b2ece08d464e30f0497a907616db5ab6a20a; retrieved 2026-09-20T22:37:40.182Z.