CEN16LA347 · Haggenmacher Bensen
Haggenmacher Bensen · Accident: loss of control in flight on approach
From Saline County Regional Airport (KSUZ) to Saline County Regional Airport (KSUZ)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN16LA347
- 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
Haggenmacher Bensen
- Aircraft type
- Haggenmacher BENSEN
- Category
- Gyroplane
- 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
- UNREG
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Saline County Regional Airport (KSUZ), Bryant, ARTo Saline County Regional Airport (KSUZ), Bryant, AR
- Aircraft age
- Not recorded
- 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 base
- 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 private pilot, who did not hold a gyroplane rating, was conducting a local personal flight in the gyroplane. A witness, who was an experienced gyroplane pilot, reported seeing the pilot make a high-speed flyby over the airport. The witness added that, as the pilot turned the gyroplane onto the left base leg for the active runway, it started to "porpoise" and that the gyroplane then pitched up, nosed over, entered a "power push-over" attitude, summersaulted, and impacted terrain.
The witness stated that the pilot had not flown for some time and lacked sufficient proficiency and skills to operate a gyroplane of this type and that the pilot was inexperienced and had low flight time in gyroplanes; no gyroplane flight time was recorded in the pilot's logbooks. He added that the pilot had a "macho attitude" and could not be told anything and that, although most of the gyroplane pilots had landed that day because of air turbulence in and around the airport vicinity and he had tried to talk the pilot into not flying because of the air turbulence, the pilot conducted the flight anyway. The pilot should not have chosen to fly in such conditions, especially given his lack of experience flying gyroplanes, and his decision to do so contributed to the accident.
Probable cause
The pilot’s loss of gyroplane control during an intentional high-speed pass, which resulted in the gyroplane porpoising and impacting terrain. Contributing to the accident was the pilot’s decision to conduct the flight in an aircraft in which he had little experience flying despite knowing that air turbulence existed in and around the airport.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN16LA347
- Event ID
- 20160904X64600
- Case number
- CEN16LA347
- 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: bc44a92cf3c7f2c11e554a1876e819197b9776eaaf41ce8f67bb77d7168732e2; retrieved 2026-09-14T21:59:38.839Z.