SEA99FA080 · Piper PA-18-150
Piper PA-18-150 · Accident: loss of control in flight during initial climb
From Ephrata Municipal Airport (EPH) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- SEA99FA080
- 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
Piper PA-18-150
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-18
- 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
- N3189Z
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Ephrata Municipal Airport (EPH)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
- 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 of other aircraft › Aircraft control, not maintained
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
During a glider tow, the glider pilot failed to ensure that his aircraft's spoilers were retracted in the locked position during takeoff. During the initial climb, the towplane pilot radioed 'SPOILERS, BOB, SPOILERS' and a witness observed seeing the spoilers extended. The glider pilot retracted the spoilers during which the glider entered a nose-high, pitch up attitude. Realizing he was in a high tow position, and before he was able to manually release the tow line from the glider, the tow rope broke in overload and within the specified tensile limits per regulatory requirements. A witness observed seeing the towplane climb to approximately 150 feet AGL and then pitch nose down, descending in an approximate 45 degree flight path to a wings level ground impact. The aircraft impacted the terrain 40-50 degrees nose low, wings-level with the engine developing power. Examination of the aircraft's tow hook release latch mechanism revealed the potential for binding of the release latch when the towed aircraft moved significantly above the horizontal (trail) position.
Probable cause
The glider pilot's failure to maintain control of his aircraft during spoiler retraction, which led to the Piper pilot's inability to recover safe flying airspeed within the altitude constraints at the time of the event. Contributing factors were the failure of the glider pilot to ensure that the spoilers were locked prior to takeoff, and the binding of the tow aircraft's tow hook release latch.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record SEA99FA080
- Event ID
- 20001212X19109
- Case number
- SEA99FA080
- 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: bffd3b9094fd950b824f4db6339a5c9226cae58cfbaaf2c2c64843ac8be466b3; retrieved 2026-09-20T22:04:29.650Z.