CEN18FA282 · Fisher CELEBRITY
Fisher CELEBRITY · Accident: aircraft structural failure en route
From Warsaw, KY (no airport) to Warsaw, KY (no airport)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN18FA282
- 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
Fisher CELEBRITY
- Aircraft type
- Fisher CELEBRITY
- 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
- N228LC
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Warsaw, KY (no airport)To Warsaw, KY (no airport)
- Aircraft age
- About 23 years (built 1995)
- 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 · cruise
- 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
- Aircraft structural failure
- 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 structures
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airline transport pilot was conducting a personal flight in his recently-purchased experimental, amateur-built biplane when the airplane experienced an in-flight breakup and subsequently impacted a cornfield. There were no witnesses to the accident. The upper and lower left wings were attached to each other but were separated from the fuselage. Part of the lower right wing was located with the wreckage but not attached to the fuselage. Additional parts of the upper and lower right wings were found scattered throughout an area between 400 yards to 800 yards west of the impact area, and other parts of the wings were found about 80 yards from the wreckage; however, the majority of the wing structure was not found.
The right wing attachment fittings displayed fractures intersecting the inboard wing spar attachment bolt hole. The fracture features for each attachment fitting were rough and matte gray in appearance, consistent with ductile overstress fracture and with upward bending of the wing at the attachment location. The outboard end of the attachment fitting piece for the aft spar was also bent aft relative to the inboard end, consistent with the entire upper and lower right wings folding upward and rearward, bending and separating from the airplane. Because this airplane is a biplane, the upward bending of the lower wing attachment was secondary to a primary failure elsewhere, the location of which could not be determined due to the fact that a majority of the wing structure was unrecovered. There was no evidence of any preexisting damage on the wing spar attachment fittings.
Probable cause
An in-flight separation of the right wing due to upward and rearward bending that led to an overstress fracture. The reason for the upward and rearward bending could not be determined based on the available information.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN18FA282
- Event ID
- 20180720X32116
- Case number
- CEN18FA282
- 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: 888da6693c827799391934ac5af1545734bd2cac018c975d61c570a0798bb805; retrieved 2026-09-15T06:44:36.649Z.