Sept. 09--Steve Appleton failed to take corrective action that would have allowed him to land his experimental plane safely during an aborted takeoff from the Boise Airport on Feb. 3, 2012, according to a probable cause report issued Monday night by the National Transportation Safety Board.
Instead, Appleton was killed after turning his Lancair IV-TP sharply to the left, sending it into a spin and crashing the plane nose-down in dirt between the two runways.
The four-page report concludes that Appleton should have tried to land back on the runway or on the hard ground beyond the end of the runway. There was 5,160 feet of runway left when he encountered problems, enough room for a safe landing by Appleton's kit-built plane, the NTSB said.
Airplane instruments showed that the plane reached 310 feet in the air and 152 miles per hour before Appleton banked the plane sharply to the left. A preliminary report had put the plane at between 100 to 200 feet off the ground before the turn.
The aircraft, which had been going 152 miles an hour before the turn, rolled once and crashed in the dirt.
Minutes earlier, Appleton aborted a takeoff after telling an air traffic controller that "we got a problem." He taxied back and nine minutes later sought takeoff clearance, telling the controller he wanted to take off and circle the airport for a "couple laps."
The NTSB faulted Appleton for taking off a second time, saying there was a "known problem" from the first takeoff attempt.
A minute after he was cleared for takeoff, Appleton called in that he would "like to turn back in and ... land ... coming back in."
Appleton's lack of training in the plane also was a contributing factor, the agency said. A preliminary report issued last month said Appleton skipped specialized training that is required in order to buy insurance for the high-speed, four-seat planes. That report ruled out mechanical failure as a cause of the crash.
A former engineer and general manager of Redmond, Ore.-based Lancair told the NTSB that if the engine failed during takeoff, the nose of the aircraft would remain in a nose-up attitude. The pilot would have only four to five seconds to make a correction by pushing the nose down, the consultant said. He said once the plane stalled, it would be impossible to come out of it if under 1,510 feet off the ground.
Appleton was likely trying to turn to return to the takeoff runway or the parallel runway, the report said. Because he did not push the nose down, it caused the plane to stall and spin before striking the ground.
"Although beyond the end of the takeoff runway was flat, unpopulated hard-dirt surface, suitable for a straight-ahead emergency landing, it is unknown why they pilot chose to return to the airport rather than lower the nose and land there," the report said.
Appleton told an attendant who fueled his plane before he took off the day he died that he liked the Lancair because it allowed him to make quick trips at a high speed. At the same time, he described the plane -- which has a track record of crashes in low-altitude, low-speed situations -- as "squirrelly."
The complexity of the flight systems on the Lancair makes it important that pilots receive an adequate orientation and specially-designed training to operate the plane safely, the Federal Aviation Administration said.
"Although the pilot was properly certificated in accordance with existing Federal Aviation Regulations and his estimated flight experience in the airplane was 13 hours 40 minutes, no evidence was found indicating that the pilot had received flight instruction in the accident airplane model, even though he was aware that insurance companies required him to do so in order to receive coverage, the NTSB report said.
Appleton bought the plane on Dec. 31, 2011, from a North Carolina company.
Of the 57 Lancair IV-TPs built from kits supplied from the Redmond, Ore., company, 15 -- 26 percent -- have been involved in accidents, according to data provided to the NTSB from the Lancair Owners and Builders Organization. Eleven of those wrecks included a fatality.
In 2008, 3.2 percent of the amateur-built aircraft registered in the United States came from Lancair but those planes accounted for 19 percent of the fatal accidents that year, the FAA reported.
Of the Lancair planes involved in crashes that year, 79 percent resulted in fatalities, the FAA said.
The company says it has sold more than 2,100 airplane kits in 34 countries.
In a notice sent to Lancair owners in 2009, the FAA said the high-performance plane's handling, stability and stall characteristics exposed pilots to additional risk during slow-speed flying near the ground.
In the notice, the FAA recommended that Lancair pilots review and thoroughly understand the plane's stall characteristics and obtain specialized training on slow flight handling, stall recognition and stall recovery techniques. The agency also recommended that all Lancair planes be equipped with an indicator warning of an impending stall.
NTSB investigators found corrosion in several components of the fuel control unit of the 2007 Lancair IVP-TP turboprop jet. However, they did not find that the corrosion contributed to the crash.
Five days before the crash, Appleton aborted another takeoff from the Boise Airport. He returned to the runway a few minutes later and practiced a series of takeoffs and landings without incident.
Appleton's flight logs were never found. When he applied for a renewal of his medical flight certificate in January 2011, he reported having flown 3,600 hours.
Appleton had experience flying a wide variety of planes and the NTSB reported that he had owned more than 20 planes in his lifetime.
Appleton and a passenger suffered serious injuries during an earlier crash in July 2004. Appleton suffered head injuries, a punctured lung, a ruptured disc and several broken bones.
He was performing acrobatic maneuvers in a stunt plane that he owned. The plane crashed in the desert south of Boise when it failed to pull up from a loop, cartwheeled across the ground and landed upside-down.
The NTSB did not find anything wrong with that plane that would have caused the wreck.
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