IAD05LA039 · Air Creation Clipper 912
Air Creation Clipper 912 · Accident: loss of control in flight on approach
From 1N4 · Woodbine, NJ to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- IAD05LA039
- 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
Air Creation Clipper 912
- Aircraft type
- Air Creation CLIPPER 912
- Category
- Weight-Shift
- 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
- UNREG
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From 1N4 · Woodbine, NJTo 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
- Approach · VFR pattern downwind
- 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
- Dual student › Aircraft control, not maintained
- Pilot in command(cfi) › Remedial action, inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The non-certified flight instructor and non-certified student pilot/owner were observed flying the non-registered airplane in the traffic pattern. While on the downwind leg, at a point abeam the runway threshold, the airplane began flying "very erratically." During a period of about 25 seconds, the airplane appeared to dive and bank, at bank angles reaching about 80 - 100 degrees. The airplane appeared to regain slight control, then entered a spiral and descended to the ground near vertically. A post accident examination of the fully functional dual flight controls revealed no evidence of any pre-impact failure.
Probable cause
The student's failure to maintain control of the airplane, and the flight instructor's inadequate remedial action, which resulted in an uncontrolled descent into terrain.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record IAD05LA039
- Event ID
- 20050302X00250
- Case number
- IAD05LA039
- Dataset
- historical-pre2008
- Source SHA-256
- 89e2df6d848e7ab3b42e7d7c7a03ff403303057a26ca04c95b3ea67201c3ce74
Source notes (5)
- 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: 4c4c5ded202b877e05307a16c92981a0efe942b1c6d76e5f11e9281f21919e65; retrieved 2026-09-20T18:07:33.435Z.
- Corrected after a review of the NTSB narrative and the aircraft's make and model, which establish these values: aircraft category. Air Creation Clipper 912 is a weight-shift (trike); the manufacturer builds nothing else. The NTSB MDB codes it AIR (Airplane), which is how the aircraft was registered rather than what it is.