ERA20LA051 · Parsons Two Place #1
Parsons Two Place #1 · Accident: flight control system malfunction/failure en route
From José Aponte de la Torre Airport (RVR) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA20LA051
- 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
Parsons Two Place #1
- Aircraft type
- Parsons TWO PLACE 1
- Category
- Gyroplane
- 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
- N446PS
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From José Aponte de la Torre Airport (RVR), Ceiba, PRTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 6 years (built 2013)
- 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
- Flight control system malfunction/failure
- 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 structures
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
About 10 minutes after departure while in cruise flight at 55-60 mph, the pilot began to feel a vibration in the airframe and an "abnormal drag." He reduced the engine power, and about that time, he felt the propeller sever the rudder cables. As he looked back, he saw the rudder separate from the airframe and the gyroplane began to spin. The pilot shut down the engine to reduce the torque and attempted to maintain control as the gyroplane rapidly descended until it impacted the ground. The fuselage and main rotor blades were substantially damaged during the accident sequence. An examination of photographs of the fractured bolt section that attached the rudder to the fuselage revealed that the bolt likely fractured as a result of reverse bending fatigue.
Probable cause
A failure of the rudder attachment bolt, which resulted in the rudder’s subsequent inflight separation from the fuselage.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA20LA051
- Event ID
- 20191210X83513
- Case number
- ERA20LA051
- 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: 25c2c64a87ced2947aba6e901cb8c5d05cf2e133fb8232367450067fdf75639d; retrieved 2026-09-16T10:45:10.839Z.