ERA14LA450 · Barger Jerry L CHALLENGER II
Barger Jerry L CHALLENGER II · Accident: loss of control in flight during initial climb
From Clarion County Airport (AXQ) to Jersey Shore Airport (P96)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA14LA450
- 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
Barger Jerry L CHALLENGER II
- Aircraft type
- Barger Jerry CHALLENGER
- 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
- N4017C
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Clarion County Airport (AXQ), Clarion, PATo Jersey Shore Airport (P96), Jersey Shore, PA
- Aircraft age
- About 7 years (built 2007)
- 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 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 as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
According to several eyewitnesses, including the current and previous owners, the pilot taxied out to the runway, returned to the hangar, and shut down the airplane's engine. The pilot reported to the previous owner that the red "water temp" indicator light illuminated. After discussing the need to open the cowling louvers, the pilot taxied to the end of the runway and began the takeoff roll. The airplane became airborne, immediately banked to the left, and then climbed to about 100 feet above ground level. The airplane continued into a 360-degree left turn and then nosed into the ground. The witnesses further reported that they heard the engine operating at or near full power until the airplane impacted the ground, with one describing the airplane as looking like a "lawn dart" until impact. Two other eyewitnesses reported that during taxi, the nose landing gear kept rising off the ground and that the pilot had difficulty maintaining ground contact with the nose landing gear.
Weight and balance calculations revealed that the airplane's center of gravity was aft of the aft-most limit of the envelope. The owner's manual stated that if the nose wheel will not remain in contact with the ground, ballast must be added until it does. The manual further stated that when the throttle is advanced, the nose will pitch down and when power is reduced, the nose will pitch up. While the airplane was equipped with a parachute system that was not armed by the pilot prior to flight, the low altitude at which the pilot lost control of the airplane would have made a successful deployment unlikely, even with the system armed. Examination of the airframe and engine revealed no evidence of mechanical malfunctions or failures that would have precluded normal operation. The pilot reportedly had not flown the accident airplane make and model before; his lack of experience with the pusher-engine airplane's handling characteristics and the aft center of gravity resulted in a low-altitude aerodynamic stall.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadequate preflight planning, which resulted in a takeoff with the airplane's center of gravity aft of its limit and led the airplane to exceed its critical angle of attack and experience an aerodynamic stall during the initial climb. Contributing to the accident was the pilot's lack of flight experience in the aircraft make and model.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA14LA450
- Event ID
- 20140923X92146
- Case number
- ERA14LA450
- 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: acd419f803ec186377b5ef2b3ac508840793d204f5391ea29c183dfbfd27f89d; retrieved 2026-09-16T01:47:59.762Z.