NYC00FA183 · Champion 7GCAA
O'Brien Aviation Champion 7GCAA · Accident: loss of control in flight while maneuvering
From N12 to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC00FA183
- 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
Champion 7GCAA
- Aircraft type
- Champion 7
- 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
- N8384V
- Operator
- O'Brien Aviation
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From N12To 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
- Maneuvering
- 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, not maintained
Approximate · Estimated position: the centre of Lakewood, NJ, the place the record names. Not the accident site.
NTSB narrative
The pilot was completing his supervised training for banner-tow operations. The airplane was configured with a single seat, and dual flight instruction was not possible. Therefore, the pilot was in radio contact with an employee of the operator, located on the ground near the pick-up area. The employee provided guidance and supervision to the pilot per the training curriculum. A witness was monitoring the radio communication frequency that the pilot was using. After the pilot picked up a banner, the witness heard him report that he had a full right rudder deflection. The employee of the operator told the pilot to land. Another witness saw the airplane making a left turn back toward the airport, consistent with a left downwind and base leg pattern for the runway. While on the base leg, the airplane stalled to the left and impacted the ground. Examination of the wreckage revealed that the banner-tow rope was entangled around the airplane's rudder horn. Although the hook was in the release position, the banner was still attached to the airplane. Additionally, the airplane was not equipped with a stall warning system. According to the operator, the pilot had a total flight experience of approximately 515 hours, of which, about 10 hours were conducting banner-tow operations in the accident airplane. The operator added that it was possible for pilots to control and land an airplane with a tow rope entangled around the rudder horn, and tow rope entanglements were addressed during training.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain airspeed, resulting in an inadvertent stall. Factors were the entanglement of the tow rope with the rudder horn, restricted rudder movement, the pilot's lack of total experience in the type of operation, and no stall warning system installed on the airplane.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC00FA183
- Event ID
- 20001212X21560
- Case number
- NYC00FA183
- 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: 229df49de67fd920053104514aacbf4c0785d3b36317aba1cb2ec743a36763bb; retrieved 2026-09-20T21:05:10.402Z.