ERA23LA010 · Green L/Gilner D RV-4
Green L/Gilner D RV-4 · Accident: aerodynamic stall/spin on approach
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA23LA010
- 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
Green L/Gilner D RV-4
- Aircraft type
- Green L/gilner RV-4
- 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
- N262DF
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 26 years (built 1996)
- 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
According to the pilot, he was on approach to a private turf airstrip when the accident event occurred. He said that after overflying the runway, he descended to 200 feet as he entered a tight left downwind leg of the traffic pattern over a nearby river. As he made the turn from downwind to final, he noted that his angle of attack instrument was reading well below critical angle, then within a second the plane rolled right and “slammed” into the ground. He offered the hypothesis that a sudden gust cut his lift and resulted in the stall/spin. He also stated that there were no preimpact mechanical malfunctions or failures of the airplane that would have precluded normal operation. Witnesses at the airport describe that they saw the airplane on the downwind leg of the approach, and that the airplane was closer to the airport compared to other airplanes that had been landing on the same runway. The witnesses described that the airplane was low, about 30 to 40 ft above the ground, and in a steep bank at high speed when it impacted the ground approximately 500 yards from the end of the runway. Postaccident examination of the airplane by a Federal Aviation Administration inspector confirmed that the airplane’s fuselage and wings were substantially damaged. Given this information, it is likely that the pilot failed to fly the airplane at an appropriate airspeed/angle-of-attack during the landing approach, which resulted in an aerodynamic stall, and impact with terrain.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain an appropriate airspeed/angle-of-attack during the landing approach, which resulted in an aerodynamic stall, and impact with terrain.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA23LA010
- Event ID
- 20221007106085
- Case number
- ERA23LA010
- 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: e20c86a85c540998ab849a52c9e3afdb70d0efb75d8a12a4781717ff66a50419; retrieved 2026-09-16T16:13:05.615Z.