CEN11CA225 · AMS-Flight D.O.O. DG-500 ELAN ORION
AMS-Flight D.O.O. DG-500 ELAN ORION · Accident: windshear or thunderstorm during landing
From Boulder Municipal Airport (KBDU) to Boulder Municipal Airport (KBDU)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN11CA225
- 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
AMS-Flight D.O.O. DG-500 ELAN ORION
- Aircraft type
- Ams Flight DG-500
- Category
- Glider
- 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
- N505KK
- Operator
- Soaring Society of Boulder
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Boulder Municipal Airport (KBDU), Boulder, COTo Boulder Municipal Airport (KBDU), Boulder, CO
- 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
- 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
- Environmental issues › Conditions/weather/phenomena
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
According to the certified flight instructor (CFI), the purpose of the flight was to practice slip maneuvers to a landing with no spoilers. While on short final of the traffic pattern, the student pilot reduced the slip to maintain the glide path, at which time, the glider encountered a sink and descended. While in the flare over a fence, the left wing impacted a fence pole, resulting in substantial damage to the glider. The CFI stated that there was nothing mechanically wrong with the glider prior to the accident.
Probable cause
The in flight loss of lift while landing, resulting in a collision with a fence.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN11CA225
- Event ID
- 20110314X70840
- Case number
- CEN11CA225
- 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: d03ba81e2fedb5ed68b9cd6eba790b763e2b7fade3b61aec55e8064d73e085d1; retrieved 2026-09-15T15:54:35.943Z.