ERA25LA147 · Champion 7AC
Champion 7AC · Accident: loss of control in flight during initial climb
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA25LA147
- 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
Champion 7AC
- Aircraft type
- Champion 7
- 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
- N1369E
- 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
- 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
- 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
- Aircraft › Aircraft oper/perf/capability
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
- Personnel issues › Physical
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The instructional flight was the student pilot’s second ever flight. The flight instructor reported that he was flying the airplane for the takeoff and initial climb. During the departure, the “nervous” student pilot grabbed the control stick and applied full left aileron input. The flight instructor tried to regain control of the airplane but was unsuccessful. The airplane subsequently struck power lines at a height of about 25 ft above ground level before impacting the ground. The flight instructor and the student were seriously injured and both of the airplane’s wings, the fuselage, and the empennage were substantially damaged during the accident. A postaccident examination of the airplane’s flight controls revealed no evidence of any preimpact mechanical malfunctions or failures that would have precluded normal operation, nor did the flight instructor report any.
Probable cause
The flight instructor’s inability to overpower control inputs made by the student pilot during initial climb, which resulted in the airplane impacting powerlines and the ground.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA25LA147
- Event ID
- 20250318199875
- Case number
- ERA25LA147
- 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: c3cc21ee7a280cb3f8a50806501322ae975b8f80bd306cf6a216f09407c810e6; retrieved 2026-09-16T19:44:40.428Z.