ERA11CA350 · Eiriavion OY PIK 20B
Eiriavion OY PIK 20B · Accident: landing area overshoot
From Sterling Airport (3B3) to Sterling Airport (3B3)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA11CA350
- 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
Eiriavion OY PIK 20B
- Aircraft type
- Eiriavion Oy PIK-20
- 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
- N99136
- Operator
- Timothy Greenwood
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Sterling Airport (3B3), Sterling, MATo Sterling Airport (3B3), Sterling, MA
- 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
- 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
- Landing area overshoot
- 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
- Aircraft › Aircraft systems
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
According to the pilot, this was his first flight in this flap only, high performance glider. The glider was towed to 5,000 feet, where the pilot practiced pattern work as well as extending and retracting the flaps, from zero degrees to 90 degrees, while maintaining an adequate airspeed for landing. The pilot entered a tight traffic pattern at the airport and extended the flaps to 30 degrees. On the final leg of the traffic pattern, the glider was in line with the runway, and the pilot intended to extend the flaps to 45 degrees, but was unsure if he did so. When the glider was halfway down the runway, the pilot knew he had excessive airspeed and was going to land further down the runway than intended. Near the end of the runway, the pilot thought he landed so he pushed the controls forward in order to gain ground control, but the glider continued over trees past the end of the runway. Since the glider did not have enough altitude to safely turn back to the runway, the pilot landed it in trees resulting in substantial damage to the fuselage. The pilot stated that he accumulated 107 hours of total flight time in a glider, of which, no hours were in the same make and model as the accident glider. The pilot reported there were no preexisting mechanical anomalies with the glider.
Probable cause
The pilot's misjudgment of the amount of flaps required to attain the proper touchdown point. Contributing to the accident was the pilot's limited experience in the high performance glider.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA11CA350
- Event ID
- 20110619X44233
- Case number
- ERA11CA350
- 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: 051be2f7a31ef82dc43b7c495877a64b922fe97f6f2f5a7efac698f46f9512d2; retrieved 2026-09-15T16:18:39.975Z.