CEN16LA175 · Airborne Windsports PTY Ltd EDGE X CLASSIC
Airborne Windsports PTY Ltd EDGE X CLASSIC · Accident: loss of control in flight during initial climb
From Rush City Regional Airport (KROS) to Rush City Regional Airport (KROS)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN16LA175
- 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
Airborne Windsports PTY Ltd EDGE X CLASSIC
- Aircraft type
- Airborne Windsports EDGE X CLASSIC
- Category
- Weight-Shift
- 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
- N701FP
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Rush City Regional Airport (KROS), Rush City, MNTo Rush City Regional Airport (KROS), Rush City, MN
- Aircraft age
- About 9 years (built 2007)
- 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
- Initial climb
- 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 as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The student pilot was conducting a solo personal flight in the weight-shift-control aircraft. Video footage showed the airplane taking off, climbing to an estimated altitude of 300 to 400 ft, banking sharply left, descending, and then impacting terrain in a steep, nose-down attitude.
The student did not have any solo endorsements on his student pilot certificate. The student had logged 14 hours in a different weight-shift-control aircraft but had never flown the accident aircraft type. The student's flight instructor said that he did not feel the student was ready to fly solo and that he had not endorsed him for solo flight. He further stated that the student mismanaged takeoffs and landings and had the tendency to "leave the [control] bar out" after takeoff instead of letting it come back, which increased the aircraft's pitch attitude and caused it to climb too steeply. It is likely that the student increased the aircraft's pitch attitude too much during the initial climb, which led to his loss of aircraft control and an aerodynamic stall.
Probable cause
The student pilot's failure to maintain the appropriate pitch attitude during initial climb, which resulted in an aerodynamic stall. Contributing to the accident was the student pilot’s decision to conduct a solo flight without a solo endorsement in an aircraft in which he had no experience flying.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN16LA175
- Event ID
- 20160509X14747
- Case number
- CEN16LA175
- 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: 2016afb48ab1c1a3c628c7f7810cd61b33147d0a8ca31f0de25dc2f4816a475b; retrieved 2026-09-14T21:45:25.243Z.