ERA20CA293
2020-08-06 · Pell City, Alabama, United States · Minor · 1 aircraft · Status: Completed
Airport PLR
Aircraft involved
Probable cause & findings
The flight instructor’s inadequate remedial action following the student pilot’s loss of directional control during landing, which resulted in a runway excursion and subsequent nose over.
Factual narrative
The flight instructor was providing initial flight training to the non-certificated student pilot in a tailwheel-equipped airplane. The flight instructor reported that while the student pilot was landing the airplane it began veering left immediately after touchdown. The flight instructor attempted to correct the yaw and applied the brakes, but the airplane continued off the left side of the runway with the tailwheel still in the air. The airplane impacted some dirt, which resulted in a nose over and substantial damage to the airplane’s left wing, empennage, vertical stabilizer, and rudder. The flight instructor reported that there were no mechanical malfunctions or failures of the airplane that would have precluded normal operation. Additionally, the flight instructor reported that the student pilot had accumulated about 2 hours of flight experience at the time of the accident and described that she, “…was showing great aptitude with landings but I should have delayed her attempting to do so to further in her training.” Source: NTSB Aviation Accident Database Retrieved: 2026-02-12
NTSB Findings
FAA avdata. C = Cause, F = Factor.
- — Aircraft-Aircraft oper/perf/capability-Performance/control parameters-Directional control-Not attained/maintained
- — Personnel issues-Task performance-Use of equip/info-Aircraft control-Student/instructed pilot
- — Personnel issues-Psychological-Attention/monitoring-Monitoring other person-Instructor/check pilot
Verbatim from NTSB's published report. Source file
NTSB_2020_ERA20CA293.txt.
Findings + structured fields enriched from FAA avall.mdb.
Full investigation docket on
data.ntsb.gov ↗.
Search this event elsewhere
External sources are reported, not agency: signal that something happened, not fact about what happened.
- TallyAero Live Wire Aviation press
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Related research
Matched on aircraft type or causal vocabulary (runway excursion). All research papers
- SKYbrary (Eurocontrol) 2024 · SKYbrary article Runway Excursion — SKYbrary Knowledge Base
SKYbrary runway excursion review — RE-OE (overruns) + RE-LO (lateral). Risk drivers: long landing, high approach speed, contaminated surface, tailwind, mis-set autobrakes.
- NTSB Aircraft Accident Reports 2019 · Accident report Embraer ERJ 175 Runway Excursion at Charlotte Douglas
Republic Airline ERJ-175 runway excursion CLT, January 2018. Examines a low-energy runway excursion involving misuse of autobrakes + thrust reverser response after a high-crosswind landing on a contam…
- NASA NTRS 2025 · Presentation Uncovering Resilient Behavior in the Aviation Safety Reporting System Using Large Language Models
Resiliency is present in everyday life, both in system design and exhibited by the operators that function within these systems.
- NASA NTRS 2025 · Conference Paper Uncovering Resilient Behavior in the Aviation Safety Reporting System Using Large Language Models
Resiliency is present in everyday life, both in system design and exhibited by the operators that function within these systems.
- Flight Safety Foundation 2024 · FSF / AeroSafety World Runway Safety Initiative Final Report (RSI)
Foundation Runway Safety Initiative final report — comprehensive analysis of runway excursion + incursion risk drivers worldwide.
- Semantic Scholar 2020 · Article Towards online prediction of safety-critical landing metrics in aviation using supervised machine learning
Abstract In recent years, due to the increased availability of data and improvements in computing power, application of machine learning techniques to various aviation safety problems for identifying,…