ANC09CA061 · Airborne EDGE 582 T
Airborne EDGE 582 T · Accident: windshear or thunderstorm on approach
From Fairbanks, AK to Metro Field (MTF)
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC09CA061
- 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
Airborne EDGE 582 T
- Aircraft type
- Airborne EDGE 582
- Category
- Weight-Shift
- 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
- N35240
- Operator
- Richard Ray Brown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Fairbanks, AKTo Metro Field (MTF), Fairbanks, AK
- 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
- Approach
- 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
- Windshear or thunderstorm
- 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
- Aircraft › Aircraft oper/perf/capability
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The student pilot reported that while taxiing his recently purchased, experimental light sport weight-shift control airplane on a residential driveway, he pushed the control bar forward, and a gust of wind lifted the airplane. He said that he was not intending to fly the airplane, but due to the gusty wind conditions, he elected to fly to the nearest airport instead of returning to the driveway. In his written report to the NTSB the pilot reported that he encountered windshear while on a southwesterly approach to Runway 24, which “slammed me into the ground.” The airplane sustained substantial damage. The pilot indicated that there were no preaccident mechanical problems with the airplane, and noted in his written report that the accident could have been avoided if he had not been taxiing the airplane in gusty wind conditions, with little previous flying experience. At the time of the accident a nearby aviation weather reporting station reported winds to be 260 degrees at 14 knots.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain control of the airplane while on approach to land, resulting in an in-flight collision with terrain. Contributing to the accident was the pilot's lack of experience.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC09CA061
- Event ID
- 20090709X25734
- Case number
- ANC09CA061
- 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: local date, investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2009-07-05.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 8f741808764f868378c4cf6ad4c6e585c606ec6dccc9ec78cef5b63b6b9aa8c6; retrieved 2026-09-15T11:46:10.343Z.