ERA20LA207 · Quad City CHALLENGER II

According to a witness, the airplane was tail heavy, so the pilot/owner and student pilot had added ballast to the front of the airplane and performed several high-speed taxi runs before departing for a test flight. After liftoff, the airplane began to yaw left and continued a left turn. The airplane did not climb and remained just above the treetops. The witness further reported that it sounded as though the pilot reduced engine power just before he lost sight of the airplane over the trees then heard the impact. The damage to trees and to the airplane was consistent with a low-energy impact. Examination of the airframe and engine revealed no evidence of mechanical malfunctions or failures that would have precluded normal operation. There were three canvas bags of sand ballast located in the forward section of the airplane that, when full, would have weighed about 22 lbs each. One of the ballast bags was wrapped around the bottom of the left rudder pedal and significantly torn, with about 5 lbs of sand remaining in the bag. There was a small amount of sand nearby, but not enough to total 22 lbs. The heavily torn ballast bag wrapped around the left rudder pedal and lack of residual sand nearby suggested that the base of the left rudder pedal likely got stuck on the left ballast bag at some point during the short flight, interfering with the flight controls and resulting in the left yaw and turn. The sand that escaped the torn left bag was likely scattered during the impact sequence, leaving very little sand near the left ballast bag when the airplane came to rest. Weight and balance calculations revealed that the airplane was 127 lbs over the maximum gross weight of 800 lbs, of which about 66 lbs was ballast. Given this information, it is likely that the pilot’s improper use of ballast weight resulted in further exceedance of the airplane’s maximum gross weight and that the placement of the ballast resulted in an interference with the rudder controls. It is likely that these two factors limited the airplane’s controllability and ability to climb, and directly contributed to the loss of control during takeoff and subsequent impact with terrain.

Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset