SEA01LA051 · Landry Gyrobee
Landry Gyrobee · Accident: in flight collision with terrain/water during takeoff
From Chehalis Centralia Airport (CLS) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- SEA01LA051
- 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
- Unknown
- 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
Landry Gyrobee
- Aircraft type
- Landry GYROBEE
- Category
- Gyroplane
- 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
- N392JL
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Chehalis Centralia Airport (CLS), Chehalis, WATo 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
- Takeoff · roll/run
- 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
- In flight collision with terrain/water
- 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 › Cyclic, improper use of
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot reported that about half way down the runway, he increased power to initiate a "crow-hop" maneuver. As the gyroplane started to become airborne it also began a right drift, which the pilot believed was from a left crosswind with slightly gusty wind conditions. The pilot reported that he "...adjusted the cyclic control to arrest the right drift..," that "...as the aircraft left the surface of the runway and became airborne, it immediately banked and drifted to the right...," and "...in attempting to adjust the cyclic control to level the aircraft, I either failed to move the control adequately, or I mistakenly moved it in the wrong direction...." The pilot reported a total of 918 hours of flight experience (all in rotorcraft) and 15 hours in the accident make. He also reported that "...the accident aircraft was fitted with an overhead cyclic control stick connected directly to the rotor head assembly..." and that "...this type of direct cyclic control can be described as having "reverse" control movements when compared to conventional cyclic control systems..." (e.g., to move the gyroplane right the pilot applies left cyclic). The majority of the pilot's flight experience was in "conventionally" controlled rotorcraft and he believed that he "...may have reverted back to [the] deeply imbedded control reflexes and moved the cyclic control in the wrong direction...."
Probable cause
The pilot-in-command's reverse application of cyclic to counteract a right drift during the takeoff roll in a gyroplane whose controls had been designed reverse of standard. Contributing factors were the gusty wind conditions and the pilot's "expectancy" or reversion to habit patterns based on non-reversed controls from the majority of his flight experience.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record SEA01LA051
- Event ID
- 20010223X00503
- Case number
- SEA01LA051
- 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: b3b2abb57ca9051d7ec9b22b0cc68ef477cb62432df2f354b1eee8c80d4a6d37; retrieved 2026-09-22T12:09:06.499Z.