DEN00LA163 · Nicholson THORP T-18CWS THORP T-18
Nicholson THORP T-18CWS THORP T-18 · Accident: loss of control in flight while maneuvering
From Wendover Airport (ENV) to SL2 · Salt Lake City, UT
Event
- NTSB case
- DEN00LA163
- 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
Nicholson THORP T-18CWS THORP T-18
- Aircraft type
- Nicholson THORP T-18CWS
- 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
- N24WN
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Wendover Airport (ENV), Wendover, UTTo SL2 · Salt Lake City, UT
- 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
- 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 › Impairment(alcohol)
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
Witnesses reported that they had seen the airplane doing aerobatics and that it was traveling around 125 to 150 knots, at about 100 to 150 feet above the ground when it went straight up, made a half turn, dropped tail first, rolled over into a dive and impacted the ground. An FAA inspector stated that his examination of the accident site indicated that the airplane impacted the ground in a near vertical attitude. The sheriff reported that the cockpit smelled of alcohol. Toxicology tests identified the pilot's blood alcohol concentration (BAC) as .22% in muscle and .23% in kidney, three times Utah's legal intoxication level of .08%. The pilot was involved in a previous accident involving the same airplane, which received substantial damage when it collided with power lines during a precautionary landing. The Sheriff's Office report on the first accident states that, upon arriving at the site, the trooper could not locate the pilot. He reported evidence of alcohol at the scene, and stated that witnesses said the pilot appeared to be intoxicated.
Probable cause
Failure by the pilot to maintain control of the airplane during aerobatic maneuvers as a result of his alcohol impairment. Factors were: The pilot's inadequate planning and decision making and the inadequate altitude he choose for maneuvering.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DEN00LA163
- Event ID
- 20001212X21949
- Case number
- DEN00LA163
- 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 2000-09-03.
- API snapshot SHA-256: b950fa50b880908d9e1c9d896f06546896fcb8a29937e4d5babb339be0d20cad; retrieved 2026-09-20T20:53:16.477Z.