ERA24LA183 · Aeronca 11AC
Aeronca 11AC · Accident: runway excursion during takeoff
From Whispering Pines Airport (GA80) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA24LA183
- 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
Aeronca 11AC
- Aircraft type
- Aeronca 11
- 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
- N3420E
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Whispering Pines Airport (GA80), Conyers, GATo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 77 years (built 1947)
- 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
- Takeoff · rejected takeoff
- 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
- Runway excursion
- 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
- Environmental issues › Conditions/weather/phenomena
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot was taking off from a 2,700-ft-long runway and described that during the initial climb, the airplane’s climb rate was insufficient to avoid the trees at the departure end of the runway. The pilot attempted to land on the remaining runway; however, the airplane departed the far end of the runway, impacted a berm, and came to rest in a lake. The airplane sustained substantial damage to the wings and fuselage. The pilot reported that the engine was operating normally and that there were no anomalies or mechanical failures that would have precluded normal operation of the airplane. Three of the closest official weather stations reported the wind was varying between being a quartering headwind to a quartering tailwind. The pilot reported receiving the weather conditions from an online, publicly available weather station, which reported that a headwind would be present for takeoff. He also provided a plot of the data from that station for the time surrounding accident, and it showed that while the wind direction was reported as he described, it had also begun to vary around that time, and continued to for some time afterward. Based on this information, it is likely that the variable wind conditions resulted in a shift in wind direction during takeoff that changed from a quartering headwind to a quartering tailwind.
Probable cause
An encounter with shifting wind conditions, which resulted in the airplane using more runway than anticipated, an aborted takeoff, and subsequent runway excursion. Contributing to the accident was the pilot’s failure account for the potential of variable and shifting wind in his departure planning.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA24LA183
- Event ID
- 20240417194104
- Case number
- ERA24LA183
- 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, 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: 309f1c2c5bf5d9e65012993e98481c7bc6776794122db5af7be0a70462edb60a; retrieved 2026-09-16T18:40:49.101Z.