WPR14LA361 · Travel Air C 4000
Travel Air C 4000 · Accident: aircraft structural failure during initial climb
From Williams Gliderport (CN12) to Williams Gliderport (CN12)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR14LA361
- 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
Travel Air C 4000
- Aircraft type
- Travel Air C-4000
- 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
- N9952
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Williams Gliderport (CN12), Williams, CATo Williams Gliderport (CN12), Williams, CA
- Aircraft age
- About 85 years (built 1929)
- 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
- Aircraft structural 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 oper/perf/capability
- Aircraft › Aircraft systems
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
A witness reported that during takeoff, the airplane reached about 8 ft above ground level, then suddenly pitched down and descended to ground contact. Postaccident examination of the airplane revealed a fractured and separated elevator control tube. A viscous liquid was inside the fractured tubing. A mixture analysis found signatures for emulsifiers, surfactants, and amines, which are often found in combination in corrosion-inhibiting compounds. The tubing fracture surfaces had features consistent with torsional overstress. A cross-section of the tube away from the fracture was examined. Corrosion was observed on the inner surfaces of the control tube, as well as significant thinning of the control tube wall thickness, which was 1/2 to 2/3 of the thickness of the least-corroded sections. The thinner wall thickness resulting from the corrosion likely could not support the same loading conditions as the full wall thickness, and likely led to the overstress separation of the control tube.
Probable cause
The failure of the elevator control tube due to corrosion, which resulted in a loss of elevator control and collision with terrain.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR14LA361
- Event ID
- 20140830X72233
- Case number
- WPR14LA361
- 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: 44a68bada36a6394ba8fce6281beb27816379c23645c39ccb20ff31c5b90fd03; retrieved 2026-09-16T01:42:14.597Z.