ERA16LA028 · Schumacher Lancair Super ES
Schumacher Lancair Super ES · Accident: windshear or thunderstorm en route
From Gulfport Biloxi International Airport (GPT) to Summerville Airport (DYB)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA16LA028
- 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
- 3 · 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
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
Schumacher Lancair Super ES
- Aircraft type
- Schumacher LANCAIR SUPER ES
- 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
- N817PR
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Gulfport Biloxi International Airport (GPT), Gulfport, MSTo Summerville Airport (DYB), Summerville, SC
- Aircraft age
- About 12 years (built 2003)
- 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
- En route
- 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
- Windshear or thunderstorm
- 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
- 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
The pilot of the experimental, amateur-built airplane departed on a visual flight rules cross-county flight toward an area of convective activity and instrument meteorological conditions. There was no record that the pilot obtained an official weather briefing for the flight. However, the wife of one of the passengers reported that, before takeoff, the pilot told her husband that he intended to fly along the coast to avoid "the worst of the weather," indicating that the pilot had at least some knowledge of the en route weather conditions. Overlaying the airplane's radar flight path on a weather surveillance radar image showed that the airplane flew along the leading edge of light intensity echoes and was approaching an area of heavy intensity echoes when radar contact was lost. The airplane's radar targets ended over the ocean.
Fragmented debris from the airplane was subsequently recovered from the water and surrounding beaches. Given the limited amount of wreckage and its severely fragmented condition, no useful information pertaining to the preimpact mechanical condition of the airplane could be obtained from the recovered wreckage. However, the fragmentation of the wreckage is consistent with the airplane impacting the water in an uncontrolled descent, and, based on the flight track and weather data, it is likely that the pilot lost control of the airplane after encountering convective shower activity.
Review of the pilot's personal medical records revealed a history of medical conditions and prescribed medications, some of which were potentially impairing, that were not reported to the Federal Aviation Administration during his most recent third-class medical certificate examination. However, because the pilot's body was not recovered, no autopsy or toxicology testing were performed, and it could not be determined whether the pilot's medical conditions or his use of impairing medications contributed to the accident.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain airplane control after encountering convective shower activity. Contributing to the accident was the pilot's decision to continue flight into an area of known adverse weather.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA16LA028
- Event ID
- 20151027X24130
- Case number
- ERA16LA028
- 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: 8cede2a2cfe406fa98d7185348df4d705794e38e3dadd2d404c1e2df3af81d14; retrieved 2026-09-14T21:33:19.893Z.