SEA04LA014 · Tracy Kolb Mark III
Tracy Kolb Mark III · Accident: hard landing during takeoff
From Prineville Airport (S39) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- SEA04LA014
- 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
Tracy Kolb Mark III
- Aircraft type
- Tracy KOLB MARK
- 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
- NONE
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Prineville Airport (S39), Prineville, ORTo 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 · rejected takeoff
- 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
- Hard landing
- 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 › 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
This was only the second time that the pilot, who was conducting a series of evaluation flights on a recently built unregistered aircraft, had flown a pusher-type aircraft. During the first flight, he could not keep the aircraft from constantly porpoising, and that flight ended in an "exceedingly hard landing." During the accident flight, the pilot pulled onto the runway, applied power, and lifted off to a height of about five feet. He then immediately cut the power and landed straight ahead. Then, because he still had a lot of runway left, he attempted another liftoff. This time he allowed the aircraft's nose to pitch up significantly steeper than he wanted it to, and therefore the aircraft quickly climbed to a height of 10 to 20 feet above the runway. The pilot then "immediately cut the power" and the aircraft pitched to a steep nose down attitude, and made a "very hard landing." As the aircraft impacted the runway surface, the pilot accidentally "hit the throttle" and the aircraft lifted off a second time. The pilot therefore "...chopped the throttle" leading to the aircraft hitting "fairly hard" a second time. At that point, because he had been severely injured by the two impacts, the pilot was no longer able to make control inputs, so he "...let the aircraft run off the runway and stop on its own." There was no evidence of any problems with the flight controls, and there was no indication that there had been any other aircraft anomalies that would have contributed to the accident sequence.
Probable cause
The pilot in command's failure to maintain aircraft control during an aborted takeoff. Factors include the pilot's lack of experience in this type of aircraft (pusher).
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record SEA04LA014
- Event ID
- 20031113X01897
- Case number
- SEA04LA014
- 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: 5b6d8cea4787a2cfdace999da5d4e01532abf3e3bb6d9d2527498c96eeaa331b; retrieved 2026-09-21T09:21:50.955Z.