ERA11LA424 · Air Tractor Inc AT-602
Sturdivant Brothers Flying Service Air Tractor Inc AT-602 · Accident: controlled flight into terrain/object (CFIT) while maneuvering
From Glendora, MS (no airport) to Drew, MS (no airport)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA11LA424
- 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
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
Air Tractor Inc AT-602
- Aircraft type
- Air Tractor AT-602
- 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
- N8525L
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Glendora, MS (no airport)To Drew, MS (no airport)
- 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 137: Agricultural
- 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
- Controlled flight into terrain/object (CFIT)
- 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 › Action/decision
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The non-instrument rated pilot departed on an agricultural aerial application flight in instrument meteorological conditions. There was no record of the pilot obtaining a weather briefing or filing a flight plan; however, company personnel stated that he obtained a computer weather briefing before departing. About 55 minutes after the flight’s departure, a friend of the pilot observed the airplane flying over a town about 7 miles from the crash site. He stated that the weather was very foggy. The wreckage was located about 13 minutes later in a rice field by a plantation employee. The employee and the plantation owner also stated that it was very foggy with about 150 feet forward visibility. Examination of the accident site revealed that the airplane impacted the ground in a left wing low, nose down attitude. Examination of the airplane revealed no evidence of preimpact mechanical malfunctions or failures that would have precluded normal operation. The airplane was not equipped for flight in instrument meteorological conditions. It is likely that the flight encountered dense fog, and the pilot lost visual reference outside and was unable to see the terrain prior to the airplane colliding with it.
Probable cause
The pilot's improper decision to conduct a visual flight rules aerial application flight in instrument meteorological conditions, which resulted in an in flight collision with the ground while maneuvering.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA11LA424
- Event ID
- 20110726X00925
- Case number
- ERA11LA424
- 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: 3ed1157f95c66cddf49ed283032d8fc75cb7bf614ac642ffaf4ab82f4d74f97c; retrieved 2026-09-13T21:38:27.537Z.