CHI07CA209 · Air Tractor AT-301
Air Tractor AT-301 · Accident: vortex turbulence encountered while maneuvering
From Kenmare Municipal Airport (7K5) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI07CA209
- 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
Air Tractor AT-301
- Aircraft type
- Air Tractor AT-301
- 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
- N8841S
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Kenmare Municipal Airport (7K5), Kenmare, NDTo 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 137: Agricultural
- 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 · aerial application
- 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
- Vortex turbulence encountered
- 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
- Wire, transmission
- 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
- Pilot in command › Altitude, low
- Pilot in command › In-flight planning/decision, poor
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane contacted the ground and power lines following a loss of control during an aerial application flight. The pilot reported that prior to spraying, he circled the field four or five times waiting for traffic to clear on a nearby road. He stated he also dropped smoke to make sure the chemical would not drift toward the road. The pilot reported that during the last circle the airplane started to settle until it contacted the terrain. The airplane then bounced and contacted the power lines. The airplane settled back to the ground, and slid across a ditch and the road before coming to rest in a grove of trees. The pilot reported that the airplane most likely contacted a vortex which resulted from the circles he made around the field. In addition, the pilot reported that he did not dump the chemical load when the airplane first started to settle toward the ground.
Probable cause
The pilot's poor in-flight planning and failure to maintain control of the airplane when he encountered his own vortex turbulence at a low altitude.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI07CA209
- Event ID
- 20070829X01267
- Case number
- CHI07CA209
- 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: d6e290eb7779d74004934f55b0b1fd8167106e27b931394637cfc87e9b46ecb1; retrieved 2026-09-21T08:46:44.230Z.