NYC03FA206 · Piper PA-18-180
Piper PA-18-180 · Accident: loss of control in flight while maneuvering
From Samuels Field (BRY) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC03FA206
- 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
- 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
Piper PA-18-180
- 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
- N4314Z
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Samuels Field (BRY), Bardstown, KYTo 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
- 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
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot seated in the rear seat was teaching glider-tow operations to the pilot seated in the front seat. After completing six landings, the pilots refueled the airplane, and then departed from runway 02 and took off. Several minutes later, witnesses heard an explosion, and observed a fire near the departure end of the runway. However, there were no known eye-witnesses to the accident. The airplane had impacted a grass area, left a debris path of approximately 95 feet, and came to rest about 75 feet prior to the runway. The debris path was right of runway centerline, oriented about a 150-degree heading, and progressed toward runway 20. Examination of the wreckage did not reveal any pre-impact mechanical malfunctions with the airframe or engine, and the fuel selector was found positioned near the left tank setting.
Probable cause
The pilot-in-command's failure to maintain aircraft control for undetermined reasons.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC03FA206
- Event ID
- 20031010X01705
- Case number
- NYC03FA206
- 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, coordinates. 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: f7ce51dd1721cdfe2a52e8477eabe15d3072cfbdc25a35e117f6436ac531eaa9; retrieved 2026-09-20T18:56:09.092Z.