CEN23LA427 · Quad City CHALLENGER II
Quad City CHALLENGER II · Accident: loss of control in flight on approach
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN23LA427
- 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
- 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
Quad City CHALLENGER II
- Aircraft type
- Quad City CHALLENGER
- 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
- UNREG
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- Not recorded
- 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 go-around
- 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
- Loss of control in flight
- 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
- Environmental issues › Conditions/weather/phenomena
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
- Personnel issues › Experience/knowledge
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
According to the airport manager, the non-certificated pilot attempted to land the light sport airplane at night. The airplane was not equipped with a two-way radio to activate the airport’s pilot-controlled runway lights. The pilot’s first landing attempt resulted in a go-around. After the go-around, the pilot called and asked a friend to shine headlights from a vehicle to illuminate the runway. On the second landing attempt, the airplane landed hard, bounced, and the pilot attempted a go-around. During the go-around the airplane impacted a beanfield. The airplane sustained substantial damage to both wings and the fuselage. The pilot did not return the National Transportation Safety Board Pilot/Operator Aircraft Accident/Incident Report Form 6120.1.
Probable cause
The non-certificated pilot’s loss of control during the night landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN23LA427
- Event ID
- 20231205193477
- Case number
- CEN23LA427
- 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: local date, investigation status, cause areas. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2023-06-14.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 7d5cd8af8fa217a37123dc1e336051ee0e13c6e258b538a47439570ae68fe29c; retrieved 2026-09-16T18:20:51.052Z.