Skip to content

Atlas / NTSB / CHI72IC015

NTSB CAROL · Event

Event CHI72IC015

1971-08-17 LOS ANGELES, California, United States None 1 aircraft Status: Completed

Registry · N103AA

FAA Aircraft Registry record.

Make / Model

AVIAT AIRCRAFT INC A-1B

Year of manufacture

2007

Engine

LYCOMING IO-360-A1D6 (200 hp)

Seats / Engines

2 seats · 1 engine

Last airworthiness date

20070614

ADS-B equipped

Yes — Mode-S A00FDA

Registrant of record

SMITH GEORGE BARKER

Source: FAA Aircraft Registry (releasable master file).

Aircraft involved

Historical record (pre-1982)

NTSB recorded this accident in the pre-1982 coded-field schema — structured fields rather than free-text narrative. Decoded codes use established NTSB single-letter taxonomies; cause factors remain verbatim pending the Form 6120.4 codebook lookup.

Aircraft

DOUGLAS DC-10 · N103AA

Damage

Minor

Craft type

Airplane

Classification

C

Light condition

Dawn

Weather

VMC

Phase of flight

D0

Weather at impact

Sky

UNKNOWN/NOT REPORTED

Aircraft history

Serial number

Z

Pilot

Certificate

DA (DA)

Probable cause (from PRE1982.MDB)

ELEV.NR 2 ENG CKD BY MAINT PERS BEFORE FLT.

Investigator remarks

TAIL CONE DOORS CAME OPEN.LODGED IN BOTH INBOARD

Cause factors

  • 70/A/BF A
    AIRFRAME DOORS,DOOR FRAMES Cause — pilot/personnel action
  • 88/A/29 A
    MISCELLANEOUS ACTS,CONDITIONS IMPROPERLY SECURED Cause — pilot/personnel action
  • 68/A/D6 A
    PERSONNEL INADEQUATE MAINTENANCE AND INSPECTION Cause — pilot/personnel action
  • 68/A/J2 A
    PERSONNEL POOR/INADEQUATE DESIGN Cause — pilot/personnel action

Decoded against the NTSB Form 6120.4 cause-factor codebook (ct_Pre1982 table). Each row shows the raw triplet, modifier (Cause / Factor / etc.), category, and specific code.

Source: NTSB pre-1982 historical archive. Docket 4 0045. Source file NTSB_1971_4_0045.txt. Modern CAROL record on data.ntsb.gov ↗.

Beyond the agency record

Search this event elsewhere.

Pre-filled searches into the sources where news + community discussion of aviation events lives. External sources are reported, not agency. Treat them as signal that something happened, not as fact about what happened.

TallyAero Live Wire Aviation press

Entity-clustered aviation events in the press — last 24 hr + 30-day archive.
NTSB CAROL Agency ↗

Official agency record + docket.
NTSB Docket Agency ↗

Investigative docket: factual reports, photos, transcripts.
Aviation Safety Network Aviation press ↗

Long-running aviation incident database (Flight Safety Foundation).
Kathryn's Report Aviation press ↗

Community NTSB synthesis blog — often has photos and witness reports.
Aviation Herald Aviation press ↗

Gold-standard aviation incident blog.
AVweb Aviation press ↗

Aviation industry news search.
Pilots of America Community ↗

GA pilot forum — informed but rumor-prone.
Reddit /r/flying Community ↗

GA pilot subreddit search.
FlightAware Aviation press ↗

Tail-number page — flight history (free tier limited).
AOPA accident database Aviation press ↗

AOPA Air Safety Institute search.
Google News News ↗

Mainstream press coverage. Recent events only.
DuckDuckGo News ↗

Privacy-preserving news search.

External links open in a new tab. We don't ingest their content; we deep-link search queries.

Related research

What the literature says.

Academic papers and agency reports matching this event's aircraft type. Sourced from NASA NTRS, NTSB Safety Studies, FAA CAMI, AOPA Air Safety Institute, Embry-Riddle Scholarly Commons, arXiv, and the Semantic Scholar academic graph.

Browse the full corpus — academia portal ↗