CHI99LA137 · Berrick GP-4
Berrick GP-4 · Accident: loss of control in flight during initial climb
From Del Caribe Santiago Mariño International Airport (PMV) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI99LA137
- 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
Berrick GP-4
- Aircraft type
- Berrick GP-4
- 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
- N54WB
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Del Caribe Santiago Mariño International Airport (PMV)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/spin
- 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
- Pilot in command › Airspeed, not maintained
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
During the initial climb, the airplane was witnessed to pitch nose-down, enter a spin, and impact terrain. According to a pilot, who was current in the accident airplane, the altitude and location where the airplane entered the stall/spin would be consistent with where the landing gear would have been in retraction. According to pilots, who had flown in the accident airplane, the gear retraction procedure was to climb to 1,500 feet above ground level, slow the airplane to within 10 MPH of the stall (power-off, gear-down, flaps-retracted) speed, and then retract the landing gear by the manually-actuated lever. According to pilots, who had flown in the accident airplane, when the airplane was held in a stalled condition it would rapidly pitch down and bank sharply to the left. The designer of the airplane stated that during a power-on stall the wing would drop, 'almost vertical,' and that 300 to 500 feet would be lost during the recovery from the stall.
Probable cause
aircraft control and airspeed not maintained by the pilot-in-command. A factor to the accident was the inadvertent stall.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI99LA137
- Event ID
- 20001212X18712
- Case number
- CHI99LA137
- 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: 42d612b9fd126388433b503452753c8f7a08165a1408ce456ffb3fe60e67c0a3; retrieved 2026-09-20T22:08:23.417Z.