ERA17FA226 · Luscombe 8 A
Luscombe 8 A · Accident: loss of control in flight on approach
From Remsen City Airport (NY57) to Remsen City Airport (NY57)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA17FA226
- 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
Luscombe 8 A
- Aircraft type
- Luscombe 8
- 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
- N45851
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Remsen City Airport (NY57), Remsen, NYTo Remsen City Airport (NY57), Remsen, NY
- Aircraft age
- About 71 years (built 1946)
- 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 final
- 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
- Aircraft › Aircraft oper/perf/capability
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The commercial pilot departed a private grass airstrip and was observed by a witness returning about 14 minutes later. The witness stated that the airplane was headed east when it made a steep right turn followed by a steep left turn to get lined up on the final approach path for runway 9. The airplane straightened out as it descended toward the runway on a normal approach path. The airplane's wings were level, and the engine was running, when the airplane suddenly nosed over and descended into a hayfield from a height of about 75 ft above the ground. Examination of the accident site indicated that the airplane impacted the hayfield in a nose-down attitude and came to rest upright about 660 ft from the end of the runway on a magnetic heading of about 261°. A postaccident examination of the airframe and a test-run of the engine found no evidence of any mechanical deficiencies that would have precluded normal operation at the time of the accident. A review of the pilot's logbook revealed that he had 13 hours of flight time in the accident airplane and had not flown in the 8 months before the accident. Since no mechanical issues were identified and based on the witness description and the wreckage, it is most likely that the pilot failed to maintain a safe airspeed as he approached the runway and exceeded the airplane's critical angle of attack, which resulted in an aerodynamic stall.
The airplane was equipped with lap belts only, and the pilot was wearing a lap belt at the time of the accident. The pilot had recently purchased new lap belt/shoulder harness assemblies that were to be installed in the airplane. The lack of a properly installed and worn upper body restraint may have contributed to the severity of some of the pilot's injuries.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain the proper airspeed and his exceedance of the airplane's critical angle of attack during landing, which resulted in an aerodynamic stall at an altitude too low for him to recover.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA17FA226
- Event ID
- 20170704X64138
- Case number
- ERA17FA226
- 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: edd9ecb3febd9fa4a8c466ad1ff88b1c8f515127d01ba141497c5b26c8636f58; retrieved 2026-09-15T06:05:27.767Z.