ERA15LA379 · Engineering & Research Ercoupe 415 C
Engineering & Research Ercoupe 415 C · Accident: loss of control in flight during landing
From Newnan Coweta County Airport (CCO) to Newnan Coweta County Airport (CCO)
Narrative check · The NTSB narrative appears to contradict this record's location. Values are shown as recorded, not corrected; compare with the narrative.
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA15LA379
- 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
Engineering & Research Ercoupe 415 C
- Aircraft type
- Engineering Research ERCOUPE 415
- 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
- N87172
- Operator
- Mallard William C
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Newnan Coweta County Airport (CCO), Atlanta, GATo Newnan Coweta County Airport (CCO), Atlanta, GA
- Aircraft age
- About 69 years (built 1946)
- 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
- 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 flight was being conducted by the private pilot/owner and an airline transport-rated pilot; it was the airplane's first test flight after an annual inspection and the reinstallation of the wings. The private pilot/owner reported that, after the airplane took off and became airborne, it banked hard left, and the other pilot took control. The other pilot stated that he had to apply full right rudder and aileron to maintain level flight. He climbed the airplane to 400 ft with full power and turned back to land on the departure runway. Once the airplane was over the runway, the pilot reduced the power, and the airplane again banked left. The pilot made a correction, and the airplane then banked right and landed hard next to the runway.
A postaccident examination of the airplane revealed no mechanical deficiencies that would have precluded normal operation of the flight controls. The owner also reported that there were no mechanical problems with the airplane. He suggested that the wing attachments may have partially given-way, but no evidence was found indicating that this occurred.
Probable cause
The pilot's loss of airplane control, which resulted in a hard landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA15LA379
- Event ID
- 20151006X62039
- Case number
- ERA15LA379
- 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: 8f1a444a55126df78880e2ceccdabd839fe78d7de5c0836ab1874221dde7ea5e; retrieved 2026-09-16T02:51:50.969Z.