WPR26LA073 · Evektor - Aerotechnik A S SPORTSTAR MAX
Atheneair Evektor - Aerotechnik A S SPORTSTAR MAX · Accident: loss of engine power (partial) en route
From Boulder City Municipal Airport (BVU) to Lake Havasu City Airport (HII)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR26LA073
- 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
- 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
Evektor - Aerotechnik A S SPORTSTAR MAX
- Aircraft type
- Evektor SPORTSTAR MAX
- 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
- N2312T
- Operator
- Atheneair
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Boulder City Municipal Airport (BVU), Boulder City, NVTo Lake Havasu City Airport (HII), Lake Havasu City, AZ
- Aircraft age
- About 14 years (built 2011)
- 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
- En route · cruise
- 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 (partial)
- 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 December 27, 2025, about 1109 Pacific standard time, an Evektor-Aerotechnik AS Sportstar Max LSA airplane, N2312T, was substantially damaged when it was involved in an accident near Needles, California. The pilot and pilot rated passenger were not injured. The airplane was operated as a Title 14 Code of Federal Regulations Part 91 personal flight.
The pilot reported that while operating in cruise flight about 6,500 ft mean sea level (msl) to Lake Havasu City Airport (HII), Lake Havasu City, Arizona, all flight instruments and engine parameters were within normal operating ranges. Without warning, the airplane began vibrating violently and the control sticks moved rapidly to their forward and aft limits several. The engine RPM decreased, the vibrations simultaneously subsided and after about 15 seconds the pilot regained the ability to manipulate the control stick. The passenger observed that one of the three propeller blades had departed the propeller hub, and the pilot initiated a forced landing on runway 02 at Needles Airport (EED), Needles, California.
Post-flight inspection of the engine revealed substantial damage to the upper left engine mount which separated from the firewall. The propeller hub was fracture-separated at the blade grip. The blade grip material and the four blade retention bolts were liberated from the hub.
The airplane was recovered to a secure area for further examination.
Verbatim NTSB factual narrative from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR26LA073
- Event ID
- 20251229202222
- Case number
- WPR26LA073
- 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: 6653a08fe5588beec28494616bd01090bb7c26c211c05a218bffe5cdebc358d2; retrieved 2026-09-16T20:38:08.231Z.