WPR18FA237 · Champion 7KCAB
Three Point Partners Champion 7KCAB · Accident: loss of control in flight en route
From Gillespie Field (SEE) to Gillespie Field (SEE)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR18FA237
- 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
Champion 7KCAB
- Aircraft type
- Champion 7
- 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
- N1682G
- Operator
- Three Point Partners
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Gillespie Field (SEE), El Cajon, CATo Gillespie Field (SEE), El Cajon, CA
- Aircraft age
- About 50 years (built 1968)
- 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
- 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
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight instructor and the pilot receiving instruction were conducting an instructional flight for spin training. About 15 minutes into the flight, the radar data showed the airplane in a slight left turn at about 2,400 ft agl, then enter a right 360o decreasing turn before dropping off radar. The last radar hit was about 1,500 ft above the accident site. The airplane's final maneuver and rapid descent are consistent with a spin entry.
The FAA Advisory Circular AC 61-67C, Stall and Spin Awareness Training, provides information that reports spin avoidance, incipient spins, actual spin entry, spin, and spin recovery techniques should be practiced from an altitude above 3,500 feet AGL.
Examination of the accident site revealed the airplane impacted terrain in a right wing and nose down attitude. Examination of the wreckage revealed no anomalies with the airframe or engine that would have precluded normal operation. Damage to the airplane's fuel tanks indicated that they contained fuel at the time of impact. Damage to the propeller revealed varying degrees of impact damage consistent with some degree of engine power at the time of impact.
According to the weight and balance calculations, the airplane exceeded its maximum gross weight at takeoff by 73 lbs and the center of gravity was outside the acrobatic flight envelope. This could have affected the spin and recovery characteristics and may have degraded or enhanced the spin maneuver. It was not determined if either pilot was aware of the weight and balance of the airplane.
Although the flight instructor had postmortem evidence of atherosclerotic disease that could pose a risk to flight safety, there was no evidence of an acute cardiac event. For both pilots, toxicology testing showed small amounts of ethanol in cavity blood and muscle, but not in brain tissue. Thus, it is likely that the ethanol is due to postmortem production and not consumption of ethanol prior to the flight.
Probable cause
The pilot's decision to enter a spin without sufficient altitude to recover. Also causal to the accident was the pilot's inadequate preflight weight and balance calculations, which placed the airplane outside the normal and acrobatic category flight envelope, effecting the spin and recovery characteristics.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR18FA237
- Event ID
- 20180823X23026
- Case number
- WPR18FA237
- 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: d09c12124d8b817e1a19e182654b8d589adb2cd9b1069c8e22b43dba234c116b; retrieved 2026-09-15T06:46:41.658Z.