NYC08CA048 · Vans Aircraft RV-8
Vans Aircraft RV-8 · Accident: loss of control in flight during landing
From Arnold Palmer Regional Airport (LBE) to Arnold Palmer Regional Airport (LBE)
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC08CA048
- 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
Vans Aircraft RV-8
- Aircraft type
- Vans RV-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
- N103JT
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Arnold Palmer Regional Airport (LBE), Latrobe, PATo Arnold Palmer Regional Airport (LBE)
- 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
- Landing · flare/touchdown
- 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
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Pilot in command › Directional 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
On his third landing of the day, the pilot of an amateur built Vans RV-8 touched down, in a tail low attitude, near the displaced runway threshold. The airplane began to veer left and right, so the pilot applied power and climbed to an altitude of 30 to 50 feet. The airplane then rolled and turned left before it overflew the left edge of the runway and parallel taxiway, while continuing to turn past a heading perpendicular to the runway centerline. The airplane continued the left turn, in an approximate 30-degree bank, and began to descend toward a low wetland adjacent to the runway. The aircraft struck the ground left wingtip first, and the left wing and left main gear separated from the airframe. The airplane then cartwheeled counterclockwise coming to rest upright on the right main landing gear and forward fuselage. This was the pilot's second incident in an RV-8. Approximately one year prior to the accident, in a different RV-8, the pilot also experienced a loss of control while practicing landings, during which the airplane veered off the left side of the runway and struck a taxiway light.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain directional control during landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC08CA048
- Event ID
- 20080109X00035
- Case number
- NYC08CA048
- 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: a1330f9ab316475e61f61c7ad1894c78b00d378bf5a11d6f14c9ae8dbc05b9f9; retrieved 2026-09-21T08:41:26.504Z.