FTW98LA313 · Shoemaker S-12 AERAILE S-12 AERAI
Shoemaker S-12 AERAILE S-12 AERAI · Accident: loss of control in flight on approach
From No airport to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- FTW98LA313
- 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
Shoemaker S-12 AERAILE S-12 AERAI
- Aircraft type
- Shoemaker S-12
- 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
- N82584
- 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
- Approach · VFR pattern base
- 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
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Pilot in command › Airspeed(vs), not maintained
- Pilot in command › Stall, inadvertent
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
Witnesses observed the aircraft turn left from a downwind leg north of the airstrip onto a final approach for a landing to the east. The turn was made at a 50 degree angle of bank, at an altitude of approximately 150-200 feet agl. During the left turn, the aircraft's nose dropped and it descended to the ground, impacting approximately 0.4 miles west of the runway. The witnesses reported that the engine was operating during the descent and continued to operate on the ground. All flight controls were found to have continuity. The pilot reported to the FAA inspector that he was not and never had been a certificated pilot or student pilot, and his only aviation experience was having flown in an ultralight style aircraft two years ago. The pilot further reported that he 'thought the aircraft, which he had just purchased the day before the accident, was an ultralight vehicle, requiring no pilot's license to operate.' This was the pilot's first flight in the aircraft. According to the builder, the Rans S-12 Aeraile kit built aircraft was constructed in 1995 'as an amateur built aircraft, and was issued a Special Airworthiness Certificate/Experimental - Operating Amateur Built Aircraft, by the Atlanta FAA.'
Probable cause
The non-certificated pilot's failure to maintain minimum required airspeed resulting in an inadvertent stall. A factor was the pilot's lack of total flight experience.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record FTW98LA313
- Event ID
- 20001211X10581
- Case number
- FTW98LA313
- 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: local date, investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 1998-07-17.
- API snapshot SHA-256: aaa31f77a68cd39abfdd64a3d2198f98eb53837cffcefb56c002fd77eb56ded1; retrieved 2026-09-21T11:23:19.608Z.