WPR14FA393 · Tifft KITFOX III
Tifft KITFOX III · Accident: loss of control in flight during initial climb
From Frontier Airpark (WN53) to Frontier Airpark (WN53)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR14FA393
- 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
Tifft KITFOX III
- Aircraft type
- Tifft KITFOX
- 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
- N307KF
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Frontier Airpark (WN53), Lake Stevens, WATo Frontier Airpark (WN53), Lake Stevens, WA
- Aircraft age
- About 20 years (built 1994)
- 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
The pilot/owner had recently purchased the tailwheel-equipped airplane. He had no experience in tailwheel-equipped airplanes and asked a flight instructor to check him out. The instructor stated that, although he was an experienced tailwheel pilot, he had no experience in the accident airplane make and model, so he flew the airplane solo for about 5 hours in order to become familiar with it. The instructor reported that while flying the airplane solo, he noticed that it would become airborne prematurely if he did not hold the control stick full forward on the takeoff run to keep the airplane on the runway while trying to gain airspeed. The instructor added that he told the pilot/owner about this and cautioned him to hold the control stick full forward on takeoff to prevent the airplane from becoming airborne inadvertently.
During the accident flight, the pilot/owner was in the left seat, and the instructor was in the right seat; the right-seat pilot position was equipped with rudder pedals but not with a control stick. The instructor stated that, during the takeoff run, the airplane became airborne prematurely because the pilot/owner failed to hold the control stick full forward as previously instructed. The instructor reported that he told the pilot/owner to lower the nose after the airplane became airborne and also tried to reach over to move the control stick forward to get the nose down but was not successful because the pilot/owner had frozen on the controls. The airplane subsequently stalled due to the loss of sufficient airspeed and impacted the ground about 225 feet east of the runway in a steep, nose-down attitude. A postaccident examination of the airframe and engine revealed no anomalies that would have preclude normal operation.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain airspeed during initial climb, which resulted in the airplane exceeding its critical angle of attack and experiencing an aerodynamic stall. Contributing to the accident was the inability of the flight instructor to take control of the airplane due to the lack of fully operational dual controls in the right-seat pilot position.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR14FA393
- Event ID
- 20140928X15808
- Case number
- WPR14FA393
- 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: e1113a22748d32affe4df39d1c5c1e17ce376f750eb04ee47e5aebd1c4bb9868; retrieved 2026-09-14T17:26:45.520Z.