ERA16LA299 · Progressive Aerodyne Inc SEAREY
Progressive Aerodyne Inc SEAREY · Accident: electrical system malfunction/failure during takeoff
From Sebring Regional Airport (SEF) to Sebring Regional Airport (SEF)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA16LA299
- 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
Progressive Aerodyne Inc SEAREY
- Aircraft type
- Progressive Aerodyne SEAREY
- 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
- N801SR
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Sebring Regional Airport (SEF), Sebring, FLTo Sebring Regional Airport (SEF), Sebring, FL
- Aircraft age
- About 15 years (built 2001)
- 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
- Electrical system malfunction/failure
- 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 systems
- Aircraft › Fluids/miscellaneous hardware
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
During initial climb on an instructional flight in the experimental amateur-built airplane, about 200 ft above ground level, the engine began running rough. The flight instructor immediately decreased the airplane's angle of attack and the engine subsequently experienced a total loss of power. The flight instructor tried to land on the remaining runway; however, the airplane landed hard and struck an embankment.
Examination of the airplane revealed wiring that contained mismatched wire gauges and splices throughout the wiring harnesses. The ground wire for the master arm solenoid was disconnected from the back of the ignition switch. Without this ground wire, the battery was disconnected from the airplane's electrical system. The airplane's rectifier kept the fuel boost pumps running per the wiring diagrams; however, a postaccident engine run revealed that the rectifier was weak and only displacing 12.3 volts, rather than its nominal output voltage of 13.5 +/- 0.2 volts. It is likely that, during takeoff, the ground wire became disconnected from the ignition switch and the weak rectifier could not adequately supply the high electrical load requirements imposed by the fuel boost pumps, the landing gear motors retracting the gear, and the strobe lights. This degraded the performance of the fuel boost pumps, resulting in fuel starvation and a total loss of engine power.
Probable cause
A disconnected ground wire during initial climb, which degraded the fuel boost pumps’ performance and resulted in a total loss of engine power due to fuel starvation.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA16LA299
- Event ID
- 20160826X04021
- Case number
- ERA16LA299
- 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: ef6ce1ff2afcc8324344a9cb3e68f5eb37153c95b995b28b23c0f7bb5ff3a6ac; retrieved 2026-09-16T04:11:38.939Z.