ERA26LA085 · Burkhart Grob Luft UND Raumfah G103 TWIN ASTIR TRAI
Huntsville Soaring Club Burkhart Grob Luft UND Raumfah G103 TWIN ASTIR TRAI · Accident: ground handling event before flight
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA26LA085
- 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
- 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
Burkhart Grob Luft UND Raumfah G103 TWIN ASTIR TRAI
- Aircraft type
- Burkhart Grob Luft Und Raumfah G103
- Category
- Glider
- 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
- N103T
- Operator
- Huntsville Soaring Club
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 47 years (built 1978)
- 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
- Prior to flight
- 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
- Ground handling event
- 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 flight instructor and student pilot of the glider were under aerotow. The flight instructor reported that very early during the takeoff, the rear canopy opened. Sitting in the rear seat and controlling the glider, the flight instructor could not close the canopy in flight and believed that continuing the tow was a higher risk than releasing and landing straight ahead. When the glider was near treetop level, the flight instructor released the tow and elected to land in a harvested corn field directly off the end of the runway. Upon touchdown, corn stalks built up in front of the glider’s main wheel, bringing the glider to an abrupt stop upright and pivoting it 180º from the direction of landing, and resulting in substantial damage to the aft fuselage. The flight instructor reported that it was likely that he did not properly close and lock the rear canopy, and that the glider had no mechanical malfunctions or failures that would have precluded normal operation.
Probable cause
The flight instructor’s failure to properly lock the rear canopy prior to flight, which led to the canopy opening during aerotow at low altitude, and a subsequent off-airport landing in a corn field.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA26LA085
- Event ID
- 20260105202242
- Case number
- ERA26LA085
- 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: 4ad5343966dd39a4f5d7d7a88c06e722fabd56ecb896bfb0810b841aa3133643; retrieved 2026-09-16T20:38:38.243Z.