ERA24LA169 · Snyder Robert L CHALLENGER II
Snyder Robert L CHALLENGER II · Accident during initial climb
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA24LA169
- 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
Snyder Robert L CHALLENGER II
- Aircraft type
- Snyder Robert 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
- N381RS
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 20 years (built 2004)
- 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
- Initial climb
- 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
- Unknown or undetermined
- 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
- Not determined › Not determined
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The private pilot departed with a tailwind from a 3,075 ft-long grass runway, climbed to about 150 ft above ground level (agl) at a speed of 41 miles per hour (mph) (the airplane’s stall speed was 37 mph), and initiated a left turn. The pilot said that during the turn, the engine rpm dropped, and he was concerned about colliding with powerlines and a motor park. Instead, he chose a 3 ft round table located on the back patio of a private residence as a target to “buff” the impact. The pilot said he lowered the nose and rolled the airplane left and “slipped” the airplane between the tall trees located in the backyard of the residence and impacted the table/patio, resulting in substantial damage to the left wing. Once the airplane was recovered from the patio, the pilot test ran the two-stroke engine on the airframe under the supervision of a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) inspector. The engine started and ran at a high and low power setting. No mechanical deficiencies or malfunctions were noted during the engine test run that would have precluded normal operation at the time of the accident.
Probable cause
A loss of engine power for undetermined reasons.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA24LA169
- Event ID
- 20240408194045
- Case number
- ERA24LA169
- 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: b4ebc6dae14e3cbe977cbce2c4427a24e71f827f06dd51eaf8af8c98536e3e32; retrieved 2026-09-16T18:38:54.485Z.