CEN26LA295 · Aviat Aircraft Inc A-1B
Scenic Concepts Aviat Aircraft Inc A-1B · Accident: flight control system malfunction/failure en route
From Spencer Municipal Airport (SPW) to La Crosse Regional Airport (LSE)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN26LA295
- 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
Aviat Aircraft Inc A-1B
- Aircraft type
- Aviat A-1
- 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
- N299CA
- Operator
- Scenic Concepts
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Spencer Municipal Airport (SPW), Spencer, IATo La Crosse Regional Airport (LSE), La Crosse, WI
- Aircraft age
- About 21 years (built 2005)
- 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
- 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
- Flight control system malfunction/failure
- 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 August 17, 2026, about 1446 central daylight time, an Aviat Aircraft Inc A-1B airplane, N299CA, was substantially damaged when it was involved in an accident near Pilot Grove, Minnesota. The two pilots received minor injuries. The airplane was operated as a Title 14 Code of Federal Regulations Part 91 aerial photography flight. The pilot in the rear seat stated they were conducting an aerial photography flight and had flown for about 5 ½ hours that day. During the flight, the front seat pilot was manipulating the flight controls and noted that the airplane was not responding normally. They observed that the left aileron had partially detached from the wing and the outboard end was hanging down. The front seat pilot executed an emergency landing to a field. During the landing, the airplane nosed over and sustained substantial damage to both wings and the empennage. Postaccident examination of the airplane revealed that the left outboard aileron hinge bracket was fractured. The airplane was retained for further examination. A review of NTSB records revealed that the airplane was involved in a similar accident in 2017 involving an inflight failure of the left outboard aileron hinge bracket assembly.
Verbatim NTSB factual narrative from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN26LA295
- Event ID
- 20260818203613
- Case number
- CEN26LA295
- 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: 5775bb0c6b342f2d56b602300f76b35da83097e693f13cc220ac35ec195a34b2; retrieved 2026-09-17T05:25:05.266Z.