WPR17FA139 · North Wing UUM Inc SPORT X2 912
North Wing UUM Inc SPORT X2 912 · Accident: loss of control in flight while maneuvering
From Lake Chelan Airport (S10) to Lake Chelan Airport (S10)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR17FA139
- 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
- 2 · 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
North Wing UUM Inc SPORT X2 912
- Aircraft type
- North Wing Uum SPORT X2 912
- 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
- N492XB
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Lake Chelan Airport (S10), Chelan, WATo Lake Chelan Airport (S10), Chelan, WA
- Aircraft age
- About 3 years (built 2014)
- 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
- Maneuvering · low-altitude flying
- 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 flight instructor and the student pilot were conducting a local flight in the weight-shift-control aircraft. An onboard camera captured the accident flight and showed that, at the time of the accident, the instructor was demonstrating a spiral dive maneuver. The video showed that the maneuver was initiated at an altitude that appears to be below 1,000 ft AGL which is a minimum required recovery altitude. During the maneuver, the aircraft's bank angle continued to increase until the aircraft entered a nearly-vertical descent and impacted terrain. Postaccident examination of the wreckage revealed no evidence of a preimpact mechanical malfunction or failure that would have precluded normal operation.
Probable cause
The flight instructor's failure to maintain control of the aircraft while demonstrating a spiral dive, which resulted in a loss of control. Contributing to the accident was the instructor's decision to demonstrate a spiral dive maneuver at an altitude that was too low for recovery.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR17FA139
- Event ID
- 20170702X44340
- Case number
- WPR17FA139
- Dataset
- full-current
- Source SHA-256
- 5cf380f0061817c0331a6b2d8cc7e0ee3a79bea469a1001dc5c10e56f35f5ab3
Source notes (5)
- 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: d999e73b2157808cbf99d66df315c192c548111b8c8c740fadcf7525329b47ee; retrieved 2026-09-15T06:05:13.730Z.
- Corrected after a review of the NTSB narrative and the aircraft's make and model, which establish these values: aircraft category. NORTH WING UUM INC SPORT X2 912 NO SERIES is a weight-shift (trike); the manufacturer builds nothing else. The NTSB MDB codes it AIR (Airplane), which is how the aircraft was registered rather than what it is.