CEN14LA336 · Northwing Design APACHE SPORT
Northwing Design APACHE SPORT · Accident: loss of control in flight
From Omro, WI to Omro, WI
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN14LA336
- 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
Northwing Design APACHE SPORT
- Aircraft type
- Northwing Design APACHE SPORT
- Category
- Weight-Shift
- 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
- N2725T
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Omro, WITo Omro, WI
- 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
- Unknown
- 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
- Loss of control in flight
- 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 › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The student pilot had installed a smaller, higher performance wing on the weight-shift control trike just before the accident flight. A witness reported seeing the trike in a descending spiral about 1 hour after it had taken off. The trike impacted terrain in a field along the final approach course for the airstrip at the departure airport.
The installation of the smaller wing increased the stall speed of the trike. It is likely that the student did not account for this increase as he slowed the trike in preparation to land, which resulted in an inadvertent stall from which he did not recover. There were no records located during the investigation to determine the pilot's experience in this or any other aircraft. A postaccident examination of the airframe, wing, and engine did not reveal any preimpact failure or malfunction.
Toxicology testing revealed that the pilot had recently used tramadol and amphetamine, but there was insufficient evidence to determine whether the drugs contributed to the cause of the accident.
Probable cause
The pilot’s failure to maintain adequate airspeed to compensate for a newly installed wing, which resulted in the aircraft stalling and the subsequent loss of control.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN14LA336
- Event ID
- 20140703X04646
- Case number
- CEN14LA336
- 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, coordinates. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2014-07-03.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 395229140665af46fd710e68cf08489cdb55979b8e027fbe950155f76d457ea2; retrieved 2026-09-14T17:20:57.094Z.