ERA14LA351 · Siler Ronald E ULTRASTAR
Siler Ronald E ULTRASTAR · Accident: loss of engine power (partial) during initial climb
From Halifax, PA (no airport) to Halifax, PA (no airport)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA14LA351
- 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
Siler Ronald E ULTRASTAR
- Aircraft type
- Siler Ronald ULTRASTAR
- 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
- N4425W
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Halifax, PA (no airport)To Halifax, PA (no airport)
- Aircraft age
- About 23 years (built 1991)
- 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
- Loss of engine power (partial)
- 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 had recently finished performing maintenance on the experimental light sport airplane after not having flown it for 3 years. After a series of successful engine run-ups and high-speed taxi tests, the pilot chose to depart on a brief local flight just after sunset. When the airplane reached an altitude of about 200 ft above the ground, the two-stroke engine slowly began to lose power. The pilot subsequently attempted to perform a forced landing to a cornfield, but the airplane slowed, exceeded its critical angle-of-attack, and subsequently entered an aerodynamic stall and impacted the ground, which resulted in substantial damage to the airplane and serious injuries to the pilot. The wreckage was not recovered from the accident site and could not be examined.
Probable cause
A total loss of engine power for reasons that could not be determined because the engine was not recovered. Contributing to the accident was the pilot's failure to maintain adequate airspeed and his exceedance of the airplane’s critical angle-of-attack during the forced landing attempt, which resulted in an aerodynamic stall and impact with terrain.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA14LA351
- Event ID
- 20140723X30157
- Case number
- ERA14LA351
- 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 2014-07-23.
- API snapshot SHA-256: e9b77addc75521ed83cb538dffca27c2c1cc660151e37b92cfaef0fbb72daa94; retrieved 2026-09-16T00:58:13.844Z.