ERA20FA003 · Champion 7ECA
Champion 7ECA · Accident: aerodynamic stall/spin while maneuvering
From North Perry Airport (HWO) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA20FA003
- 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
- 0
- 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 7ECA
- 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
- N2561G
- Operator
- N3542w
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From North Perry Airport (HWO), Hollywood, FLTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 52 years (built 1967)
- 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
- Maneuvering
- 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
- Aerodynamic stall/spin
- 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 › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
During a training flight, the pilot receiving instruction “froze on the controls” during a demonstration of a power-off stall. He did not respond to the flight instructor’s commands to release the controls, and the instructor was unable to overpower the pilot’s control inputs. The airplane remained in a stall condition, descended, impacted marshland, and sustained substantial damage to the wings and forward fuselage. The airplane’s altitude at the start of the descent was not captured by radar data; however, the airplane had previously been flying at altitudes of 100 to 500 ft mean sea level in the practice area about 1.5 minutes before radar altitude data was lost.
Probable cause
The pilot’s failure to relinquish the airplane controls to the instructor during a power-off stall maneuver, which prevented the instructor’s recovering from the stall.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA20FA003
- Event ID
- 20191005X90127
- Case number
- ERA20FA003
- 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, cause areas. 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: 9d716be4a4ceabc131c048734e33ef6802108689bc6f079f202658a10a4c8c0b; retrieved 2026-09-16T10:17:51.964Z.