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Atlas / NTSB / DEN91DQA01

NTSB CAROL · Event

Event DEN91DQA01

1990-11-10 ALAMOGORDO, New Mexico, United States Airport · ALM Fatal 1 aircraft Status: Completed

Registry · N51DY

FAA Aircraft Registry record.

Make / Model

PAPA 51 LTD CO THUNDER MUSTANG

Year of manufacture

2005

Engine

AMA/EXPR UNKNOWN ENG

Seats / Engines

2 seats · 1 engine

Last airworthiness date

20050827

ADS-B equipped

Yes — Mode-S A65F78

Registrant of record

NURYA LLC

Source: FAA Aircraft Registry (releasable master file).

Aircraft involved

Probable cause & findings

PARTIAL LOSS OF ENGINE POWER FOR AN UNDETERMINED REASON, IMPROPER PLANNING/DECISION BY THE PILOT, AND THE PILOT'S FAILURE TO MAINTAIN ADEQUATE AIRSPEED, WHICH RESULTED IN AN INADVERTENT STALL.

Factual narrative

ON THE FIRST FLIGHT OF AN EXPERIMENTAL HOMEBUILT AIRCRAFT, THE PILOT TOOK OFF WITH WHAT NUMEROUS WITNESSES DESCRIBED AS A ROUGH RUNNING ENGINE. THE FLIGHT PATH AFTER TAKEOFF WAS A PATTERN FOR A RETURN TO LANDING FLOWN AT LESS THAN NORMAL PATTERN ALTITUDE. DURING THE TURN TO FINAL, THE AIRCRAFT WAS OBSERVED TO STALL AND ROLL AT APPROXIMATELY 100 FEET ABOVE GROUND LEVEL FOLLOWED BY A STEEP IMPACT. THE AIRCRAFT WAS EXTENSIVELY DAMAGED BY IMPACT AND GROUND FIRE. NO REASON WAS FOUND FOR THE APPARENT LOST OF POWER. Source: NTSB Aviation Accident Database (Pre-2008 Archive) Retrieved: 2026-02-12

Verbatim from NTSB's published report. Source file NTSB_1990_DEN91DQA01.txt. Findings + structured fields enriched from FAA avall.mdb. Full investigation docket on data.ntsb.gov ↗.

Related research

What the literature says.

Academic papers and agency reports matching this event's aircraft type or causal vocabulary (stall). 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 ↗