NYC08LA087 · Unknown Free Bird Sportlite
Unknown Free Bird Sportlite · Accident: loss of control in flight while maneuvering
From McCullough, AL (no airport) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC08LA087
- 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
- 1 · 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
Unknown Free Bird Sportlite
- 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
- N75474
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From McCullough, AL (no airport)To 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
- Maneuvering
- Defining eventThe 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
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot owned the accident airplane, but had not yet obtained a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) sport pilot certificate. Further, the airplane had not been inspected and certified as an experimental light sport aircraft. A witness observed the accident airplane depart a private turf airstrip and fly around the local area. About 30 minutes later, the airplane impacted a field nose down near the departure airstrip. Most of the airplane was consumed by a postcrash fire; however, flight control continuity was confirmed. The airplane was equipped with a heavy engine, respectively, which may have created an aft center of gravity (CG) condition. Such circumstances would require modification to move the CG forward, prior to completing certification. The pilot had accumulated about 25 hours of flight instruction, and had soloed, but had not completed a long cross-country flight. Several months before the fatal accident, the pilot was involved in a prior accident in the same airplane. The prior accident occurred during a high-speed taxi, in which the airplane accidentally became airborne. The pilot was subsequently advised by a designated airworthiness representative, and a flight instructor, not to fly the airplane until it was certificated, and the pilot received a sport pilot certificate.
Probable cause
The non-certificated pilot's failure to maintain aircraft control while maneuvering. Contributing to the accident was the non-certificated pilot's improper decision to conduct a flight prior to the airplane being properly inspected and certified.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC08LA087
- Event ID
- 20080210X00160
- Case number
- NYC08LA087
- Dataset
- full-current
- Source SHA-256
- 5cf380f0061817c0331a6b2d8cc7e0ee3a79bea469a1001dc5c10e56f35f5ab3
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: 4e80350d565c27bb360204a7e079d8f7eb62457d98a05e2a29c025137eea65cc; retrieved 2026-09-13T18:55:21.562Z.