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Atlas / NTSB / ERA21LA381

NTSB CAROL · Event

Event ERA21LA381

2021-09-03 Fort Lauderdale, Florida, United States Airport · FXE None 1 aircraft Status: Completed

Aircraft involved

Probable cause & findings

The flight instructor’s loss of airplane control during an attempted go around maneuver, which resulted in an aerodynamic stall, and subsequent impact with the runway.

Factual narrative

The flight instructor stated that on the eighth traffic pattern approach, the student pilot maintained a stabilized approach on the centerline and on short final. At 50 ft above the ground, the flight instructor told the student pilot to reduce engine power. Then, he instructed the student to “flare now,” but the student continued the approach in a nose down attitude. As the flight instructor began to take control of the airplane, it impacted the runway “hard” with the main landing gear and bounced. The flight instructor added power in an attempted go around maneuver, however, the airplane “began to stall.” The airplane descended, the right wing struck the runway marker, the nose struck the ground, and resulted in the airplane coming to rest inverted. The rudder and fuselage were substantially damaged during the accident sequence. The flight instructor reported that there were no preaccident mechanical malfunctions or failures with the airplane that would have precluded normal operation. 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).

  • Personnel issues-Task performance-Use of equip/info-Aircraft control-Student/instructed pilot
  • Personnel issues-Task performance-Use of equip/info-Aircraft control-Instructor/check pilot
  • Aircraft-Aircraft oper/perf/capability-Performance/control parameters-Angle of attack-Not attained/maintained
  • Aircraft-Aircraft oper/perf/capability-Performance/control parameters-Airspeed-Not attained/maintained

Verbatim from NTSB's published report. Source file NTSB_2021_ERA21LA381.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 ↗