CHI08IA109 · Eclipse Aviation EA500
Eclipse Aviation EA500 · Incident: flight control system malfunction/failure en route
From Coleman A. Young Municipal Airport (DET) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI08IA109
- 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
- Incident
- 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
Eclipse Aviation EA500
- Aircraft type
- Eclipse EA500
- 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
- N539RM
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Coleman A. Young Municipal Airport (DET), Detroit, MITo 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
- En route · cruise
- 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
- Flight control system malfunction/failure
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- None
Cause areas
- Aircraft › Aircraft structures
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The instructor pilot reported that the pilot receiving training had completed a simulated engine failure of the right engine. Upon completion of the maneuver, he attempted to re-trim the rudder trim since it was set at 58 percent left trim. The rudder trim did not respond. The instructor pilot switched to Alternate trim but without success. The pilots followed the checklist items found in the Quick Reference Handbook (QRH) but without success. The manual trim did not correct the condition with the airspeed at about 200 knots. The instructor pilot executed a precautionary landing without incident. The airplane was shut down. When the airplane was restarted, the condition was corrected and the rudder trim operated normally. On April 30, 2008, Eclipse Aviation issued a Customer Pilot Communication (CPC) No. 500-2008-007 titled "Rudder Trim Operation." The CPC stated, "There have been several instances of Eclipse 500 operators reporting an inability to actuate the rudder trim following acceleration from a practice single engine event. It was determined that this is caused by trimming rudder for a slow airspeed and then accelerating without removing trim, significantly increasing the trim tab loading and exceeding the trim motor design stalling point. This is considered normal operation, as it is a feature of the design to prevent excessive rudder loads."
Probable cause
The inadvertent stalling of the rudder trim actuator motor during flight due to the pilot's unintentional exceedence of the motor's design limit for stalling while accelerating after completing a simulated engine-out maneuver.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI08IA109
- Event ID
- 20080424X00536
- Case number
- CHI08IA109
- 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, damage. 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: 5ae234edd3823cf549748a46b3dab07d83a98191a0ce8f3e6322d5d7f20beed8; retrieved 2026-09-15T09:34:19.103Z.