CEN16FA111 · Cirrus Design Corp SR20
Cirrus Design Corp SR20 · Accident: loss of control in flight on approach
From Navasota Municipal Airport (60R) to an unrecorded destination
Narrative check · The NTSB narrative appears to contradict this record's fatalities. Values are shown as recorded, not corrected; compare with the narrative.
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN16FA111
- 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
- 4 · all aircraft and ground Possible conflict
- 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
Cirrus Design Corp SR20
- Aircraft type
- Cirrus SR20
- 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
- N477TC
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Navasota Municipal Airport (60R), Navasota, TXTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 13 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
- Approach · VFR pattern downwind
- 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
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight instructor and the airplane owner, who did not hold a pilot certificate, were practicing takeoffs and landings in the airplane at an uncontrolled airport. Based on logbook records, this was most likely an instructional flight and the owner was most likely flying the airplane. Air traffic control radar and primary flight display data showed that they had performed two touch-and-go landings followed by two full stop landings before the accident. Shortly after taking off following the second full stop landing, while climbing through 550 ft mean sea level (msl) at an indicated airspeed of about 92 knots, the airplane entered a left bank and began to decelerate. The airplane began to descend, and the airspeed subsequently decreased below 75 knots before it began to increase. The airplane reached a 61° left-wing-down attitude at an airspeed of about 79 knots before entering a rapid roll to the right, through an inverted position. At about the same time, the airplane began a rapid pitch down, reaching a 69° nose-down attitude. The airplane briefly recovered to nearly wings level but again began to pitch down until the final recorded data point, which showed the airplane in a 65° nose-down and 45° right-wing-down attitude, at 268 ft msl, and 89 knots indicated airspeed. The airplane impacted terrain about 0.43 miles from the departure end of the runway.
Postaccident examination of the airplane did not reveal any mechanical malfunctions or failures that would have prevented normal operation. Calculations based on the airplane's weight at the time of the accident indicated that, at 1g with flaps up, the aerodynamic stall speed would have been 75 to 78 knots calibrated airspeed. The stall speed in a 60° turn (2 g) would have been 105 to 109 knots. Therefore, it is likely that the combination of a steep left bank and low airspeed resulted in an accelerated aerodynamic stall.
Probable cause
The flight instructor's delayed remedial action to prevent a stall at an altitude that was too low to recover. Contributing to the accident was the owner/non-certificated pilot's failure to maintain control of the airplane, which resulted in an accelerated aerodynamic stall.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN16FA111
- Event ID
- 20160228X22433
- Case number
- CEN16FA111
- 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: 019f9cad5457eec28fe2acdbb16f99ecc493a2802e31e31ccf157f68b44978b6; retrieved 2026-09-14T21:42:40.611Z.