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Atlas / NTSB / MIA00LA239

NTSB CAROL · Event

Event MIA00LA239

2000-08-16 ZEPHYRHILLS, Florida, United States Serious 1 aircraft Status: Completed

Aircraft involved

Probable cause & findings

The student pilot's failure to maintain airspeed on final approach resulting in an inadvertent stall/spin and subsequent in-flight collision with terrain.

Factual narrative

On August 16, 2000, at about 1403 eastern daylight time, a Schweizer SGS 1-34, N7679, registered to Tampa Bay Soaring Society Inc., operating as a 14 CFR Part 91 personal flight, crashed on landing in the vicinity of Zephyrhills Municipal Airport (ZPH), Zephyrhills, Florida. Visual meteorological conditions prevailed, and no flight plan was filed. The glider sustained substantial damage and the student pilot sustained serious injuries. The flight originated from ZPH, about 33 minutes before the accident. The pilot remembers departing on the glider flight; and remembers returning to the traffic pattern, but has no further recall of the events leading up to the accident. The brother of the injured pilot stated he observed the glider established on a low and slow final to runway 36, before the glider started spinning to the right. He contacted UNICOM on a handheld radio and asked them to call 911. The glider was observed to enter the traffic pattern for landing. On final approach the witness described the approach as low and slow, before the glider started spinning to the right and collided with the terrain. Source: NTSB Aviation Accident Database (Pre-2008 Archive) Retrieved: 2026-02-12

Verbatim from NTSB's published report. Source file NTSB_2000_MIA00LA239.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 ↗