Instructor pilot reported violent flight control fluttering after takeoff and elected to land on the remaining runway rather than chance a flight around the pattern. The aircraft had been deiced prior to takeoff.

ACN 1965711 2023-01 DA20-C1 Eclipse Commuter and GA Icing Incidents

Takeoff / Launch ComponentPart 91

What is ASRS?

The Aviation Safety Reporting System is NASA's voluntary, confidential, non- punitive incident-reporting system, established 1976. Pilots, controllers, dispatchers, and maintenance technicians file reports describing safety- relevant events. NASA de-identifies every report before adding it to the public database. Reports are not investigated by NASA, the FAA, or the NTSB — they represent the reporter's perspective.

Pilot narrative

Verbatim from the de-identified NASA record. First-person account by the reporter. NASA strips identifying details (names, company, specific time); anonymization placeholders are ZZZ, X, Y.

During the pre-flight, there was icing observed on the control surfaces that was carefully and thoroughly removed. The icing was a result of rain from the previous day that had frozen over night. I would like to emphasize that all of the ice was removed during the pre-flight phase. During takeoff, after rotating and becoming airborne, and while increasing airspeed, there was a violent fluttering of the flight controls observed that negatively affected the controllability of the aircraft. The effects were severe enough that I do not believe that we would have been able to successfully complete an entire lap in the traffic pattern to land back at the airport. Fortunately, the runway was long enough that we were able to make a successful landing on the remaining runway and terminate the flight without further incident. It was concluded after the flight that the most likely cause was that some of the rain from the day before had made its way into some of the flight control surfaces and caused the fluttering once we reached a high enough airspeed for the imbalance to cause the fluttering. After temperatures warmed up above freezing, the airplane was flown again without issue. My biggest issue with this occurrence is that there is really no way to check for icing inside of the control surfaces on any airplane that I have ever flown. As far as I'm aware, the only way to detect this issue is to fly the airplane and observe the fluttering. Proper corrective action if this is observed in the future would be to abort the takeoff, if able, and if unable to abort, reduce to an airspeed that prevents the fluttering and return to land at or below that particular airspeed.

NASA classification — Anomalies

Aircraft Equipment Problem
Deviation / Discrepancy - Procedural
Inflight Event / Encounter

NASA classification — Assessments

Contributing Factors / Situations: Aircraft · Human Factors · Procedure · Weather
Primary Problem: Procedure

ASRS reports are voluntarily submitted, de-identified by NASA, and represent the reporter's perspective. The presence of reports on a topic cannot be used to infer prevalence in the National Airspace System. The authoritative source is the NASA ASRS Database Online at asrs.arc.nasa.gov ↗.