CEN15IA200 · Air Tractor Inc AT 402A
Taylor Air Service Air Tractor Inc AT 402A · Incident: flight control system malfunction/failure while maneuvering
From Taylor Airport (15AR) to Taylor Airport (15AR)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN15IA200
- 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
- Incident
- 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
Air Tractor Inc AT 402A
- Aircraft type
- Air Tractor AT-402
- 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
- N623LA
- Operator
- Taylor Air Service
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Taylor Airport (15AR), Brickeys, ARTo Taylor Airport (15AR), Brickeys, AR
- Aircraft age
- About 15 years (built 2000)
- 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 137: Agricultural
- 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
- Maneuvering · low-altitude flying
- 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
- Flight control system malfunction/failure
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Minor
Cause areas
- Aircraft › Aircraft systems
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot reported that, during an agricultural application pass, the elevator control felt abnormal. The pilot chose to return to the airport and noted that the elevator control was unresponsive. The pilot attempted to maintain pitch control by using the elevator trim, but turbulence made this difficult. During the off-field landing, the airplane's nose pitched down. The pilot countered with nose-up trim, and the airplane stalled and then impacted the ground, which resulted in minor damage to the propeller.
A postincident examination revealed that the attachment hardware, including the bolt and nut, at the elevator pushrod had separated. Maintenance had been performed on the elevator control pushrod about 20 hours before the incident flight, and the bolt and nut would have been removed and reinstalled during this maintenance. It is likely that maintenance personnel did not properly reinstall the attachment hardware after performing the maintenance.
Probable cause
The in-flight separation of the attachment hardware at the elevator control pushrod due to maintenance personnel's improper reinstallation of the attachment hardware.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN15IA200
- Event ID
- 20150420X91520
- Case number
- CEN15IA200
- 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: 2f2b9cdf9fb21b4a1df90cb2bd71bd0758c7b4be488cbd56732a3eace01aca02; retrieved 2026-09-16T02:14:46.568Z.