ANC14FA050 · Piper PA 12
Piper PA 12 · Accident: flight control system malfunction/failure during takeoff
From Merrill Field (MRI) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC14FA050
- 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
Piper PA 12
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-12
- 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
- N3512M
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Merrill Field (MRI), Anchorage, AKTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 67 years (built 1947)
- 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
- Takeoff
- 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
- Aircraft › Aircraft systems
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The accident flight was the airplane's first flight after undergoing maintenance and modification over the course of several years. A witness reported that, during the takeoff, the airplane climbed steeply in an extreme, nose-high attitude until it "pivoted" at the apex of the climb and then entered a descent straight to the ground. The airplane's described motions are consistent with the airplane exceeding its critical angle of attack and entering an aerodynamic stall; crush damage to the nose of the airplane and the leading edges of the wings was consistent with a nearly vertical flight path at the time of impact. Examination of the wreckage revealed that the airplane's elevator control cables were misrigged, such that they were attached to the incorrect (opposite) locations on the upper and lower elevator control horn, resulting in a reversal of elevator control inputs. Maintenance logs for the airplane contained no entries more recent than 2007. Several people reported that the pilot often performed maintenance on the airplane; however, none indicated knowledge of who performed maintenance on the elevator controls. A "BEFORE TAKEOFF" checklist for the airplane included the item, "CONTROLS – FREE AND CORRECT." If the pilot had checked the elevator for correct motion before takeoff, he likely would have discovered that it was misrigged.
Probable cause
The incorrect (reverse) rigging of the elevator control cables, and the pilot’s inadequate preflight inspection, which failed to detect the misrigging.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC14FA050
- Event ID
- 20140702X22950
- Case number
- ANC14FA050
- 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: eafb5da63c760b4936d75d4a19d95acde83b4836732a66438348e6b9fe389711; retrieved 2026-09-14T17:20:53.996Z.