CEN18FA140 · Bordiuk CHALLENGER II SPECIAL
Bordiuk CHALLENGER II SPECIAL · Accident en route
From Hefner Farms Airport (7TS9) to Hefner Farms Airport (7TS9)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN18FA140
- 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
Bordiuk CHALLENGER II SPECIAL
- Aircraft type
- Bordiuk CHALLENGER
- 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
- N635DT
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Hefner Farms Airport (7TS9), Bovina, TXTo Hefner Farms Airport (7TS9), Bovina, TX
- Aircraft age
- About 22 years (built 1996)
- 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
- En route
- 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
- Unknown or undetermined
- 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
- Not determined › Not determined
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight instructor and the student pilot departed at sunset on a local flight in the airplane from a private airstrip adjacent to the flight instructor's home. About 25 minutes after takeoff, the flight instructor's sister was about 3 miles from the airstrip and observed the airplane fly over her position about 3 miles from the airstrip. She reported that the airplane was low, but nothing seemed unusual and both pilots waved to her. When the airplane did not return to the airstrip, the flight instructor's wife reported it overdue. The wreckage was located early the following morning. There were no known witnesses to the accident.
Postaccident airframe and engine examinations did not reveal any anomalies consistent with a preimpact failure or malfunction. In the absence of any witnesses, or an identified preimpact failure or malfunction with respect to the airplane, the investigation was unable to determine the cause of the impact with the terrain.
The student pilot's toxicology testing was positive for dextrorphan and doxylamine in liver tissue but not in cavity blood; however, the levels present were far too low to have had any significant effects.
Probable cause
An in-flight impact with terrain for reasons that could not be determined due to a lack of evidence.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN18FA140
- Event ID
- 20180416X41835
- Case number
- CEN18FA140
- 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: local date, investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2018-04-16.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 20fdea1f8f4055a2467bfc5460633e359eeac736c5b2981bcb11fc462bd95419; retrieved 2026-09-15T06:38:59.650Z.