CEN23LA254 · LET L-23 SUPER BLANIK
Sandhill Soaring Club LET L-23 SUPER BLANIK · Accident: aerodynamic stall/spin on approach
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN23LA254
- 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
- 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
LET L-23 SUPER BLANIK
- Aircraft type
- Let L-23
- Category
- Glider
- 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
- N10BR
- Operator
- Sandhill Soaring Club
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 32 years (built 1991)
- 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 student pilot reported that he was flying the glider until about 10 minutes before the accident, when the flight instructor took over control and started looking for thermals to gain altitude. He said the flight instructor was mostly quiet until he said they were going to perform an off-field landing. The glider flew across a tree line about 150 ft above ground level and turned to land in a bean field. Neither the student nor the flight instructor had any recollection of the accident. Postaccident examination showed that the forward fuselage was crushed upward, and rearward and the outboard 6 ft of the left wing was separated. The separation point had signatures indicating upward bending of the tip. The damage to the glider was consistent with a nose-low, left-wing-low impact. Flight control continuity was verified from the cockpit to all control surfaces. No anomalies were detected. Based on the available information, the glider likely had insufficient altitude to return to the departure airstrip and the flight instructor attempted an off-field landing. The nose-low, left-wing-low impact suggested that the instructor likely exceeded the glider’s critical angle of attack and encountered an aerodynamic stall at low altitude during the landing attempt.
Probable cause
The flight instructor’s failure to maintain adequate airspeed and his exceedance of the glider’s critical angle of attack, leading to an aerodynamic stall during the off-field landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN23LA254
- Event ID
- 20230623192425
- Case number
- CEN23LA254
- 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: 758e179e80106b1d8502e10d6bd98ec9c06f7e274c254b871172141d00e7b153; retrieved 2026-09-16T17:45:24.531Z.