Avoiding In-Flight Loss of Control, Part 1

In general aviation, we have a loss of control problem. While the stereotypical landing accident creates the most accident reports, loss of control in-flight creates the most fatalities.

This article (and the rest of the series) are an effort to identify actions we can take to reduce our chances of having a LOC-I accident. It’s based on the analysis of 2,296 LOC-I accidents between 2014 and 2023 taken from the NTSB CAROL database. The numbers reveal where safety efforts have genuinely paid off—and where gravity and aerodynamics continue to catch pilots off guard.

The Data

At the grand scale, I grouped these accidents into three major categories.

Ground Level (Below 25 feet AGL): 851 accidents. These usually happened right on the runway surface during takeoff rolls, landing flares, touchdowns, or rollouts. They are close cousins to LOC-G (loss of control on the ground) accidents. Roughly 24% of people (passengers and crew) involved in ground level accidents were fatally injured.

Non-Recoverable (25 to 1,250 feet AGL): 1,133 accidents. It takes anywhere between about 800 and 1,500 feet of altitude to recover from a fully developed spin. The non-recoverable zone is the altitude range where it’s unreasonable to expect that a pilot can reliably recover from an upset. Roughly 57% of people involved in a non-recoverable accident were fatally injured.

Recoverable (Above 1,250 feet AGL): 312 accidents. These upsets occurred high enough to recover, but the pilot was unable to do so. They typically occur due to spatial disorientation, in-flight icing, mountain wave, or another associated hazard. Roughly 89% of people involved in a recoverable accident were fatally injured.

This grouping isn’t perfect. For example, the recoverable altitude for an American Champion Citabria is very different than the recoverable altitude for a Piper Aztec, and it likely varies from pilot to pilot. Roughly 1,250 feet is a best guess, based on the lowest altitude for which I could find a successful recovery in NASA’s ASRS database.

Did the Numbers Actually Change?

Over the ten-year period, the overall LOC-I accident rate fell significantly, from 1.17 to 0.70 per 100,000 flight hours. But these changes were not uniform across all categories.

The Ground Level accident rate fell by 60% (from 0.541 to 0.224), and the Recoverable accident rate fell by 30% (from 0.520 to 0.369). Unfortunately, the Non-Recoverable category showed no statistically significant improvement.

The uneven improvement suggests that we’re not properly addressing all causal factors. As an industry, some of our “solutions” appear to be based in myth, while we ignore some significant facts.

The Base-to-Final Turn: Myth vs. Reality

Every student pilot hears about the dreaded base-to-final turn. The story goes that a pilot overshoots the runway centerline, steps hard on the inside rudder to swing the nose around, pulls back on the yoke to hold altitude, and accidentally cross-controls the airplane into a fatal spin.

The physics are real: An uncoordinated turn at low speed can snap an airplane into an immediate spin with little altitude to recover. Yet over the entire 10-year study, base-to-final turns accounted for only 82 total accidents (3.5%). While the base-to-final turn deserves respect, it’s not the dominant hazard.

The High-Risk Go-Around

We typically think of go-arounds as our safe escapes from a bad landing, but the data shows a different story.

Outside of training, pilots abort a landing only about once every 75 to 100 arrivals. Even at this low rate, rejected landings caused 315 LOC-I accidents (13.7%). That gives the go-around an unusually high accident rate per maneuver.

Distractions and Secondary Emergencies

Another major pattern in the accident files is the presence of an unrelated problem or cockpit distraction. Your piloting skills will degrade when you’re facing an unlatched door, a disruptive passenger, or an emergency you need to manage. In more than 500 LOC-I accidents (over 22%) the loss of control occurred while the pilot was handling an unrelated distraction. I speculate that this number is much higher as some distractions may not make it into the accident report.

Is Upset Recovery Training the Gold Standard?

Upset Prevention and Recovery Training (UPRT) has been called the gold standard of LOC-I safety. The data demands a more grounded look.

UPRT is great for high-altitude upsets and for building fundamental stick and rudder skills. But the recovery part is only directly applicable in the less than 15% of cases where the upset was recoverable, and we’re not seeing improvement in that category. Even the most capable pilots are unable to violate the laws of physics. Focus should be on the prevention part of UPRT.

Avoiding Loss of Control

At the risk of sounding obvious, the key to avoiding loss of control accidents is avoiding the loss of control. There are four key areas you should consider when building your skill set.

Human Factors. Stress tends to cause people to focus on the stressor and block out extraneous information. When your airplane’s energy state and attitude are treated as extraneous, bad things happen. As pilots, we need to be skilled at dividing our attention, even when stressed.

Trim. Correctly used, trim is a wonderful tool for reducing pilot workload and directing the airplane back to controlled flight. Used incorrectly, it can do exactly the opposite. Learning when to trim the airplane for what you’re doing (typically during straight and level flight) and when not to is an important skill.

Automation. As a flight instructor, I’ve lost count of the number of times the autopilot has leveled off at a preset altitude without the student noticing. Lacking the corresponding application of power, airspeed decays, AOA increases, and we approach an upset. Used correctly, automation can prevent LOC-I accidents, but used incorrectly it can create them.

Weather. Mountain wave, accidental flight into IMC, and in-flight icing can all create the conditions for a loss of control accident. Knowing how to read the weather and respond to unexpected hazards is critical.

What’s Next?

As the series continues, we’ll dive into each of those four areas looking for concrete ways we can protect ourselves.

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