ERA25LA070 · William M Clapp CLAPP-SABERWING
William M Clapp CLAPP-SABERWING · Accident: hard landing
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA25LA070
- 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
William M Clapp CLAPP-SABERWING
- Aircraft type
- William M Clapp CLAPP-SABERWING
- 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
- N100SW
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 5 years (built 2019)
- 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
- Landing · flare/touchdown
- 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
- Hard landing
- 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 structures
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The private pilot was practicing takeoffs and landings and reported that while maneuvering through the traffic pattern, the canopy became partially opened. The canopy was equipped with two side latches and one main latch at the rear of the canopy. The right-side latch held the canopy partially secured until the final approach segment when it also released, and the canopy opened completely. The airplane subsequently nosed down and contacted the ground nose first just short of the runway whereupon the nose landing gear separated from the airplane and the main landing gear collapsed, which resulted in substantial damage to the fuselage. The pilot was seriously injured. The pilot reported forgetting to lock the main rear latch to the canopy after opening it during taxi. The pilot reported that there were no preimpact mechanical malfunctions or failures with the airplane that would have precluded normal operation.
Probable cause
A hard landing and subsequent gear collapse due to the pilot’s failure to securely close the airplane canopy and its subsequent opening on short final.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA25LA070
- Event ID
- 20241209199398
- Case number
- ERA25LA070
- 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 UTC date the NTSB stores; the local time zone is not recorded, so the local date may differ by a day.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 5141e3ac514530dc9aeccbe7832a905f1d6c3039ab8944504e72db7ddecc18a4; retrieved 2026-09-16T19:31:48.736Z.