ERA12LA150 · M-Squared Aircraft BREESE 2
M Squared Aircraft M-Squared Aircraft BREESE 2 · Accident: flight control system malfunction/failure during initial climb
From Roy E. Ray Airport (5R7) to Roy E. Ray Airport (5R7)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA12LA150
- 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
M-Squared Aircraft BREESE 2
- Aircraft type
- M Squared BREESE 2
- 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
- N582MS
- Operator
- M Squared Aircraft
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Roy E. Ray Airport (5R7), Bayou La Batre, ALTo Roy E. Ray Airport (5R7), Bayou La Batre, AL
- 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
- Initial climb
- 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
- Flight control system malfunction/failure
- 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
- Not determined › Not determined
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The student pilot and a flight instructor completed three landings without incident. The flight instructor then exited the airplane, and the student pilot performed a full-stop landing without incident. During the subsequent climb after takeoff, the airplane yawed to the right, nearly 90 degrees from the departure runway heading. The student pilot noted that he was unable to depress the left rudder pedal more than 1 or 2 inches and that the right rudder pedal moved without resistance. He also noticed that the elevator control felt "loose and sloppy." The student pilot determined that he did not have enough controllability to safely land the airplane and subsequently chose to maneuver over a field and deploy the airplane's ballistic recovery parachute system. The forward portion of the fuselage was substantially damaged upon ground contact.
Postaccident examination of the airplane revealed that the tail skid/rudder control tube was fractured. The rudder pedals were displaced during the impact with the ground; however, all connections remained intact. No other discrepancies of the flight control system were observed. Metallurgical examination of the fractured tube revealed that it failed due to bending overstress. Although it is possible that contacting the tail skid on the runway at a high-pitch attitude could produce similar loading, it is more likely that the inertial loads on the tail structure during the impact were responsible for the fracture. The airplane had been operated for 575 total hours since new and 75 hours since its most recent condition inspection, which was performed about 4 months before the accident.
Probable cause
The pilot's inability to maintain control of the airplane for reasons that could not be determined because postaccident examination of the rudder control system did not reveal any anomalies that would have precluded control of the airplane.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA12LA150
- Event ID
- 20120123X91012
- Case number
- ERA12LA150
- 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: 49657a1668b9f6e99188da8aac2fc3433f65862191289780b4892bac3decad9c; retrieved 2026-09-15T17:05:37.663Z.