CEN16FA094 · Costruzioni Aeronautiche Tecna P92 ECHO SUPER
Houston LightSport Aviation Costruzioni Aeronautiche Tecna P92 ECHO SUPER · Accident: loss of control in flight during takeoff
From Houston, TX to Houston, TX
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN16FA094
- 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
- 1 · 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
Costruzioni Aeronautiche Tecna P92 ECHO SUPER
- Aircraft type
- Tecnam P92
- 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
- N323BR
- Operator
- Houston LightSport Aviation
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Houston, TXTo Houston, TX
- Aircraft age
- About 10 years (built 2006)
- 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
- Takeoff
- 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
- Destroyed
Cause areas
- Aircraft › Aircraft oper/perf/capability
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight instructor and a student pilot, who had flown about 5 flight hours with the instructor, were conducting an instructional flight in the light sport airplane. The student pilot reported that he was conducting the takeoff with the instructor assisting, and about 200 ft. above ground level, the airplane began to drift off the runway centerline. The student said that he attempted to correct, but it felt like the airplane was losing engine power and the nose was dropping. He added that he was pulling back on the controls and that the instructor was also pulling back, in an attempt to recover. A witness reported seeing the airplane climbing after takeoff in a nose high attitude when the left wing dropped, and the airplane entered a descending left turn. The airplane then impacted two parked airplanes on a ramp adjacent to a parallel taxiway. A postcrash fire consumed the majority of the airplane. Due to the fire damage, only a limited examination could be conducted; however, no preimpact abnormities were noted with the engine and airframe. The circumstances of the accident are consistent with a power-on departure stall.
Probable cause
The student pilot's loss of control after exceeding the airplane's critical angle-of-attack, which lead to a power-on, aerodynamic departure stall. Contributing to the accident was the flight instructor's inadequate oversight of the student pilot.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN16FA094
- Event ID
- 20160201X43119
- Case number
- CEN16FA094
- 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, coordinates. 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: 8a22d9e5b42f96ffac65a59697b63042fc4bc15db520b909b8171fb5fc68da5d; retrieved 2026-09-14T21:39:47.541Z.