LAX06FA005 · American Champion (ACAC) 8KCAB
Alpine Aviation American Champion (ACAC) 8KCAB · Accident: loss of control in flight during initial climb
From Oroville Municipal Airport (OVE) to Oroville Municipal Airport (OVE)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX06FA005
- 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
American Champion (ACAC) 8KCAB
- Aircraft type
- American Champion (acac) 8
- 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
- N943D
- Operator
- Alpine Aviation
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Oroville Municipal Airport (OVE), Oroville, CATo Oroville Municipal Airport (OVE), Oroville, CA
- 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
- Initial climb
- 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
- Also codedOther events the NTSB coded in the sequence, such as a wire strike after a loss of power. Flight Findings uses them for its kinds of event. Glossary
- Stall/spin
- 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
- Flightcrew › Airspeed(vso), 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
Seconds after takeoff during an instructional flight, the airplane stalled and impacted into an open field about 0.2 miles from the runway's departure end. The purpose of the flight was for the certified flight instructor (CFI) to provide the private certificated pilot instruction in unusual attitude maneuvers including in-flight loss of control and engine failure after takeoff with a return to runway landing. Ground witnesses observed the airplane in its initial takeoff climb at a 45-degree nose up attitude reach about 650 feet above ground level (agl), whereupon it stalled, banked sharply left, and then "fell out of the sky." Thereafter, it descended in a nose down attitude to ground impact while reversing direction. The accident site and wreckage examination revealed the airplane impacted the ground in a near level flight attitude. Insufficient altitude existed for the CFI to fully recover from the incipient spin/stall. A post impact ground fire destroyed the airplane. The airframe and engine were examined, and no evidence of any mechanical malfunction or control system disconnect was found.
Probable cause
The certified flight instructor and the private pilot's failure to maintain adequate airspeed while attempting a return to runway maneuver, which resulted in an inadvertent stall.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX06FA005
- Event ID
- 20051013X01647
- Case number
- LAX06FA005
- 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: 5e7acbc773144dec37ba70f5de531d76ea3c48edd30b68697f13f87f6f86eb85; retrieved 2026-09-20T17:49:47.039Z.