ERA22FA015 · Velocity SE RG
Velocity SE RG · Accident: flight control system malfunction/failure on approach
From Sebastian Municipal Airport (X26) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA22FA015
- 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
- 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
Velocity SE RG
- Aircraft type
- Velocity SE RG
- 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
- N755V
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Sebastian Municipal Airport (X26), Sebastian, FLTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 15 years (built 2006)
- 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
- Approach · VFR pattern final
- 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
- Destroyed
Cause areas
- Aircraft › Aircraft systems
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot was conducting a personal flight in an experimental amateur-built airplane that he had owned for about 5 years before the accident. During short final approach, the airplane pitched up, climbed about 300 ft, descended nose down, and impacted a grass area next to the runway. A postcrash fire consumed most of the wreckage.
The elevator push-pull tube section that connected to the control stick was recovered with no threaded rod end engaged, and the rod end was not recovered. Metallurgical examination of the elevator push-pull tube section revealed no contact marks from the jam nut. Also, the first three threads in the threaded plug were missing. The threads had fractured in shear overstress, and likely resulted in the push pull tube separating during flight and the pilot’s subsequent loss of airplane control.
Review of the airplane kit assembly manual revealed instructions to have at least 0.5 inches of thread engagement with the rod end in the 1.5-inch threaded plug (with a note indicating that “all the way in is best”). Due to the lack of maintenance documentation, the investigation could not determine when or why the most recent adjustment to the rod end was made.
Toxicology testing identified doxylamine in the pilot’s specimens. The main effect from doxylamine that can degrade performance is sleepiness. Because sleepiness would not have likely led to the airplane’s sudden pitch up during landing, the pilot’s use of doxylamine likely did not contribute to the accident.
Probable cause
The separation of the airplane’s elevator control push-pull tube, which resulted in a loss of control during the approach.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA22FA015
- Event ID
- 20211014104103
- Case number
- ERA22FA015
- 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, coordinates, 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: 5a020950eb6280062e9b392a3644c963c4f1fd6669ccea222dc363b6ccb4f4dd; retrieved 2026-09-15T07:35:30.375Z.