ERA18LA117 · Stanley Lancair IV-P
Stanley Lancair IV-P · Accident: propeller/jet/rotor blast or suction while taxiing
From Buckingham Field (FL59) to Sebring Regional Airport (SEF)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA18LA117
- 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
Stanley Lancair IV-P
- Aircraft type
- Stanley LANCAIR
- 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
- C-GSQQ
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Buckingham Field (FL59), Fort Myers, FLTo Sebring Regional Airport (SEF), Sebring, FL
- Aircraft age
- About 19 years (built 1999)
- 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
- Taxi · from runway
- 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
- Propeller/jet/rotor blast or suction
- 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
- Organizational issues › Management
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot made position reports over the airport's common traffic advisory frequency (CTAF) while inbound to the airport for landing. After landing and exiting the runway onto a taxiway, the pilot stopped and reconfigured the airplane and noticed a Boeing 737 (B737) south of his position with the left engine cowling missing. Neither he nor his front seat passenger perceived that either engine was running, and there were no barricades positioned around the airplane to indicate that engine runs were in progress. The accident pilot proceeded to taxi about 200 to 300 ft behind the B737, which was operating with both engines at 85% power. The accident airplane cartwheeled in the jet blast from the running engines and came to rest upright on grass, resulting in substantial damage. The pilot of another airplane and a groundcrew member monitoring the engine runs both attempted to warn the accident pilot over the CTAF of the running B737 engines, but were unsuccessful. The airport director reported that there was an "unwritten" policy in place that his approval was required before B737 engine maintenance runs. Although personnel from the maintenance facility that conducted the engine runs reported that they had received permission from airport management to do so, the airport director reported that neither he nor his staff approved the activity on the day of the accident. In addition, the installation of barricades to block the taxiway behind the running airplane would have prevented the accident by keeping other airplanes a safe distance from the B737.
Probable cause
The failure of ground personnel to obtain permission from airport management to conduct engine test runs; adequately monitor the area behind the B737 for traffic; and install barricades to prevent access behind the running airplane, which resulted in the accident pilot's loss of control during taxi due to an encounter with the jet blast. Contributing to the accident were the accident pilot's failure to detect that the B737 engines were running, and the airport management's failure to establish written standard operating procedures regarding engine runs.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA18LA117
- Event ID
- 20180328X04527
- Case number
- ERA18LA117
- 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: 7532b180b5d9652a561eb3b3ca1c125f4ddaaaac534e345e0f2d3364f20be6f6; retrieved 2026-09-16T06:44:11.061Z.