ERA15FA335 · Cooper Michael C RV 8A
Cooper Michael C RV 8A · Accident: low altitude operation/event while maneuvering
From Twin Lakes Airport (8A7) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA15FA335
- 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
- 2 · 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
Cooper Michael C RV 8A
- Aircraft type
- Cooper Michael RV-8
- 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
- N393MC
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Twin Lakes Airport (8A7), Advance, NCTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 14 years (built 2001)
- 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
- Maneuvering · aerobatics
- 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
- Low altitude operation/event
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Destroyed
Cause areas
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilots, who co-owned the airplane, departed for a personal flight and, after completing one circuit around the airport traffic pattern, were performing a low-altitude, high-speed pass over the runway. About halfway down the runway length, the airplane entered a barrel roll to the left and, after passing through 180 degrees of roll, began a descent that continued to ground contact. Postaccident examination of the flight controls revealed no evidence of preimpact failure or malfunction. Although the rear seat flight control stick was found separated and had not been properly secured in compliance with a service bulletin, it was damaged in a manner consistent with the impact and likely did not contribute to a loss of control. The pilots' decision to perform aerobatic maneuvers at low altitude significantly diminished their margin for error, and once the airplane began to descend while maneuvering, the pilots likely did not have adequate time to recover before impacting the ground.
Probable cause
The pilots' failure to maintain airplane control during a low-altitude maneuver.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA15FA335
- Event ID
- 20150902X51516
- Case number
- ERA15FA335
- 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: 1e5072d00cb0f34bed877635612ac41cf1a5bb42f64ce5e287856897ac53afd0; retrieved 2026-09-14T21:29:50.875Z.