WPR25LA154 · LEE Aviation LLC JA30 SUPERSTOL
LEE Aviation LLC JA30 SUPERSTOL · Accident: loss of engine power (total) during initial climb
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR25LA154
- 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
- Ongoing
- 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
LEE Aviation LLC JA30 SUPERSTOL
- Aircraft type
- Lee JA30
- 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
- N128EL
- Operator
- Nicholas Berry
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 11 years (built 2014)
- 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 engine power (total)
- 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
No findings designated as a cause are recorded in the NTSB data yet.
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
On May 9, 2025, about 1020 mountain daylight time, an experimental amateur-built Just Aircraft Superstol, N128EL, was substantially damaged when it was involved in an accident near Evanston, Wyoming. The pilot and passenger were not injured. The airplane was operated as a Title 14 Code of Federal Regulations Part 91 personal flight. The pilot reported that shortly after departing runway 23 at the Evanston-Uinta County Burns Field (EVW), Evanston, Wyoming, and while in the crosswind leg of the traffic pattern about 250 ft above ground level, a puff of smoke came out from the top of the engine cowling followed by a total loss of engine power. The pilot advanced the throttle, pitched the nose down, and turned the airplane left towards runway 5. Subsequently, the pilot realized he was not going to make it to the runway and initiated a forced landing on a taxiway. The airplane landed hard and short of the taxiway on a hillside and sustained substantial damage to the fuselage. The airplane was recovered to a secure location for further examination.
Verbatim NTSB factual narrative from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR25LA154
- Event ID
- 20250512200143
- Case number
- WPR25LA154
- 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. 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: ff9079476067f39503801b9a1e93848eed69816003c2fd08f4e3230e0bdeaac5; retrieved 2026-09-16T19:52:48.411Z.