ERA11FA214 · Aerostar S A YAK-52
Aerostar S A YAK-52 · Accident while maneuvering
From XFL · Palm Coast, FL to XFL · Palm Coast, FL
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA11FA214
- 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
Aerostar S A YAK-52
- Aircraft type
- Aerostar YAK-52
- 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
- N808TD
- Operator
- Walker William e Dba · private individual
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From XFL · Palm Coast, FLTo XFL · Palm Coast, FL
- 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 · aerobatics
- 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
- Unknown or undetermined
- 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
During the third and final aerobatic flight that day, after completing a loop maneuver called the “heart” maneuver, the pilot failed to recover from the nose-low descent before ground impact. A video recording of the last segment of the flight revealed no parts separated from the airplane.
The airplane was substantially damaged by impact forces and a postcrash fire that nearly consumed the fuselage and portions of both wings; however, there was no evidence of a preimpact failure or malfunction of the flight controls for roll, pitch, or yaw. The right flap was noted to be extended, which agreed with the as-found position of the single flap actuator. Although no brain tissue, blood, or cardiac tissue were available for examination at autopsy, analysis of the limited evidence available found nothing to support a medical cause for impairment or incapacitation.
Video evidence suggests that the airplane’s flightpath angle became shallower during the last 1.3 seconds of the recording, which was very near the time of impact, when compared with the earlier portion of the descent. Cursory examination of the engine and damage to the propeller blades suggest the engine was developing power at the moment of impact.
Probable cause
The pilot’s failure to recover from the nose-low descent during an aerobatic maneuver.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA11FA214
- Event ID
- 20110326X83319
- Case number
- ERA11FA214
- 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: eee11ceb1d13c65bf842a996f3e0ea76b8d83c2652ddbf0d1049a71a74a9bc6f; retrieved 2026-09-13T21:17:49.404Z.