ERA09LA200 · Cirrus Design Corp SR22
N2877B Cirrus Design Corp SR22 · Accident: loss of control in flight while maneuvering
From Montgomery County Airpark (GAI) to Kalamazoo/Battle Creek International Airport (AZO)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA09LA200
- 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
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
Cirrus Design Corp SR22
- Aircraft type
- Cirrus SR22
- 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
- N213CP
- Operator
- N2877B
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Montgomery County Airpark (GAI), Gaithersburg, MDTo Kalamazoo/Battle Creek International Airport (AZO), Kalamazoo, MI
- 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
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Personnel issues › Psychological
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
During the initial climb after takeoff on an instrument-flight-rules flight, as the airplane entered clouds about 700 to 1,000 feet above mean sea level, the passenger door opened about 2 to 3 inches, which allowed rain, cold air, and increased noise to enter the cockpit. The pilot said that he became spatially disoriented and that the airplane subsequently "stalled and started to spin." The pilot activated the Cirrus Airplane Parachute System and the airplane descended toward the ground. The left wing struck a parked vehicle and the airplane came to rest on a road about 1/2 mile west of the airport. The airplane's left wing was fractured and the empennage was separated just forward of the horizontal stabilizer. Examination of the airplane, which included the passenger door locking mechanism, did not reveal any mechanical anomalies. The pilot reported 327 hours of total flight experience, which included 161 hours in the same make and model as the accident airplane, and about 7 and 63 hours of actual and simulated instrument flight experience, respectively. A weather observation taken at the departure airport about the time of the accident included a visibility of 2 miles and overcast clouds at 400 feet.
Probable cause
The pilot’s spatial disorientation after the passenger door opened during flight in instrument meteorological conditions. Contributing to the accident was the pilot’s failure to properly secure the door latch.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA09LA200
- Event ID
- 20090316X84733
- Case number
- ERA09LA200
- 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. 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: 1bcc44691a9fab3bd666c1cec244af34b5a9f5fb0bf58f687e653813924962e6; retrieved 2026-09-15T10:50:41.245Z.