ERA15LA039 · Curtiss Wright P 40B
Collings Foundation Curtiss Wright P 40B · Accident: loss of control on ground during landing
From New Smyrna Beach Municipal Airport (EVB) to New Smyrna Beach Municipal Airport (EVB)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA15LA039
- 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
Curtiss Wright P 40B
- Aircraft type
- Curtiss Wright P-40
- 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
- N284CF
- Operator
- Collings Foundation
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From New Smyrna Beach Municipal Airport (EVB), New Smyrna Beach, FLTo New Smyrna Beach Municipal Airport (EVB), New Smyrna Beach, FL
- Aircraft age
- About 73 years (built 1941)
- 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
- Landing · landing roll
- 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 on ground
- 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
- Environmental issues › Conditions/weather/phenomena
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
According to the pilot, except for the 1.2 hours of flight time that he had accumulated during two test flights in the accident airplane, which had occurred within the previous 30 days, he had not flown an airplane of the same make and model in about 4 years. The accident flight was the second flight in the airplane since it had been reassembled. The pilot attempted to land the airplane with a 13-knot crosswind. During the landing, the tailwheel "shimmied" when it contacted the runway, and the airplane immediately began to veer right. The pilot attempted to arrest the turn with left rudder and left brake inputs, but the airplane ground looped and subsequently departed the right side of the runway, which resulted in substantial damage to the left wing and lower fuselage. Postaccident examination of the rudder and braking systems revealed no mechanical anomalies or malfunctions that would have caused the loss of directional control.
Probable cause
The pilot’s failure to maintain directional control while landing with a crosswind, which resulted in a ground loop and a subsequent runway excursion.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA15LA039
- Event ID
- 20141031X55441
- Case number
- ERA15LA039
- 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: 923df5125d439876906c55f40f412df8f8d1aa15bdf7f687260415bb2752cb96; retrieved 2026-09-16T01:54:27.481Z.