ERA22LA332 · Whitten Robinson AVENTURA II
Whitten Robinson AVENTURA II · Accident: aerodynamic stall/spin on approach
From Merritt Island Airport (COI) to an unrecorded destination
Narrative check · The NTSB narrative appears to contradict this record's location. Values are shown as recorded, not corrected; compare with the narrative.
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA22LA332
- 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
- Event fatalities
- Unknown
- 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
Whitten Robinson AVENTURA II
- Aircraft type
- Whitten Robinson AVENTURA
- 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
- N709CW
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Merritt Island Airport (COI), Merritt Island, FLTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 13 years (built 2009)
- 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
- 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
- Aircraft › Aircraft oper/perf/capability
- Personnel issues › Task performance
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 had accrued 954 total hours of flight experience but had only flown about 3.2 hours during four flights in the experimental amateur-built amphibious accident airplane. The pilot departed from a grass area next to a runway at the airport where he kept the airplane. After an uneventful local flight he returned to the airport to land. He performed go-arounds during the first two landing approaches due to being either too high or too fast. During the third landing attempt, the pilot thought the approach looked “OK” but then he noticed that he was too low, and too slow, so he increased engine power and applied slight up elevator. The pilot explained that the engine was on top of the wing (mounted in a pusher configuration) and normally when power was added the airplane would initially pitch down but would level off and then climb. The pilot described that this time though when he was too slow (about 45 knots), he added an extra amount of power, which pushed the nose down and made the airplane descend. He then “got scared,” “gave too much up elevator,” and believed that the airplane entered an aerodynamic stall. The airplane then struck the ground and a fence at an airspeed of about 55 knots. The pilot was seriously injured and postaccident examination of the airplane revealed that the fuselage was substantially damaged. The pilot reported that during the accident flight, the flight controls and engine all operated normally.
Probable cause
The pilot’s failure to maintain control of the airplane during final approach to land, which resulted in an exceedance of the airplane’s critical angle of attack, aerodynamic stall, and collision with a fence and terrain.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA22LA332
- Event ID
- 20220724105556
- Case number
- ERA22LA332
- 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: 1940884b4c0111ebd47ff948efe6aae01b663c0f25ce39e7c5a07ed1fce6a6c9; retrieved 2026-09-16T15:30:03.749Z.