NTSB CAROL · Event
Event ERA12CA236
Aircraft involved
Probable cause & findings
An inadvertent encounter with a bird during cruise flight.
Factual narrative
The flight instructor and the student pilot began preparing for arrival at the destination airport at the conclusion of an instructional flight. While cruising at an altitude of 1,600 feet, they turned the airplane north, and noticed three buzzards that were ahead, below, and to the right of their airplane and climbing. The pilots disconnected the autopilot and entered a climbing left turn in an attempt to avoid the group of birds. After avoiding two of the birds, the remaining bird suddenly changed direction and impacted the right wing, resulting in substantial damage to its composite structure. After advising air traffic control of the encounter, the pilots landed the airplane uneventfully at a nearby airport. The flight instructor and the student pilot were in cruise flight at 1,600 feet above the ground, preparing to land after an instructional flight, when they noticed three buzzards that were ahead, below, and to the right of their airplane and climbing. The pilots entered a climbing left turn and successfully avoided two of the birds; however, the remaining bird suddenly changed direction and impacted the right wing, resulting in substantial damage to its composite structure. After advising air traffic controllers of the encounter, the pilots landed the airplane uneventfully at a nearby airport. Source: NTSB Aviation Accident Database Retrieved: 2026-02-12
NTSB Findings
Hierarchical cause / factor breakdown from the FAA bulk avdata database. Each finding tagged C (Cause) or F (Factor).
- C Environmental issues-Physical environment-Object/animal/substance-Animal(s)/bird(s)-Effect on equipment - C
Verbatim from NTSB's published report. Source file
NTSB_2012_ERA12CA236.txt.
Findings + structured fields enriched from FAA avall.mdb.
Full investigation docket on
data.ntsb.gov ↗.
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Related research
What the literature says.
Academic papers and agency reports matching this event's aircraft type or causal vocabulary (autopilot). Sourced from NASA NTRS, NTSB Safety Studies, FAA CAMI, AOPA Air Safety Institute, Embry-Riddle Scholarly Commons, arXiv, and the Semantic Scholar academic graph.
- arXiv 2025 · arXiv preprint
ROSflight 2.0: Lean ROS 2-Based Autopilot for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
ROSflight is a lean, open-source autopilot ecosystem for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Designed by researchers for researchers, it is built to lower the barrier to entry to UAV research and acceler…
- arXiv 2025 · arXiv preprint
ROSplane 2.0: A Fixed-Wing Autopilot for Research
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) research requires the integration of cutting-edge technology into existing autopilot frameworks.
- arXiv 2024 · arXiv preprint
A Data-Driven Autopilot for Fixed-Wing Aircraft Based on Model Predictive Control
Autopilots for fixed-wing aircraft are typically designed based on linearized aerodynamic models consisting of stability and control derivatives obtained from wind-tunnel testing.
- arXiv 2022 · arXiv preprint
Experimental Flight Testing of a Fault-Tolerant Adaptive Autopilot for Fixed-Wing Aircraft
This paper presents an adaptive autopilot for fixed-wing aircraft and compares its performance with a fixed-gain autopilot.
- arXiv 2021 · arXiv preprint
An Adaptive Digital Autopilot for Fixed-Wing Aircraft with Actuator Faults
This paper develops an adaptive digital autopilot for a fixed-wing aircraft and compares its performance with a fixed-gain autopilot.
- arXiv 2020 · arXiv preprint
Reinforcement Learning for Robust Missile Autopilot Design
Designing missiles' autopilot controllers has been a complex task, given the extensive flight envelope and the nonlinear flight dynamics.
Browse the full corpus — academia portal ↗