WPR14LA177 · Airplane Factory (PTY) Ltd THE SLING
Airplane Factory (PTY) Ltd THE SLING · Accident: controlled flight into terrain/object (CFIT) en route
From Zamperini Field (KTOA) to Barstow Daggett Airport (KDAG)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR14LA177
- 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
Airplane Factory (PTY) Ltd THE SLING
- Aircraft type
- Airplane Factory (pty) LTD The SLING
- 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
- N511NG
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Zamperini Field (KTOA), Torrance, CATo Barstow Daggett Airport (KDAG), Daggett, CA
- Aircraft age
- About 3 years (built 2011)
- 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
- En route · descent
- 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
- Aircraft › Aircraft oper/perf/capability
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The sport pilot and flight instructor were approaching the destination airport at the conclusion of a night cross-country flight in the light sport airplane. The sport pilot stated that, about 10 miles southwest of the airport, they could clearly see the airport lights and began a visual descent from 5,500 ft mean sea level. During the descent, the airplane collided with terrain about 5 miles from the airport and came to a stop. The sport pilot egressed and called for emergency services.
Postaccident examination of the airframe and engine revealed no mechanical anomalies that would have precluded normal operation. Visual meteorological conditions were present in the area with visibility of 10 miles. Astronomical information showed that moonset had occurred about 3.5 hours before the accident. The accident occurred in a very sparsely populated area of high desert, with no ground lighting. The terrain and dark night conditions would have prevented both pilots from maintaining a visual reference to the terrain.
Examination of the airplane's Electronic Flight Information System (EFIS) revealed that the aural terrain warning function was not enabled, though the system still depicted a moving map display with terrain information. If the aural terrain warning function had been enabled, the pilots would have been alerted, and action could have been taken in sufficient time to maintain terrain clearance.
Probable cause
The pilots’ failure to maintain clearance from terrain while operating in dark night, visual meteorological conditions. Contributing to the accident was the pilots’ failure to enable the aural terrain warning system.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR14LA177
- Event ID
- 20140430X30514
- Case number
- WPR14LA177
- 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: local date, investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2014-04-30.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 9641beb3603ddd6f38937daa9c4e8b2222901464f91d51dd805e0082987a27f5; retrieved 2026-09-15T23:33:50.091Z.