The pilot was practicing taxiing in his recently purchased airplane in Sprague, Wash. While taxiing, the Kitfox unintentionally became airborne.
The pilot decided that in an effort to not collide with an electric fence ahead, he would need to add full power and fly the airplane in a traffic pattern to come back and land.
Despite being aware of a powerline in the area, he collided with it during his third landing attempt, resulting in a serious injury.
The NTSB determined the probable cause as the pilot’s failure to maintain adequate clearance from powerlines during the landing approach resulting in a collision.
NTSB Identification: WPR14CA279
This July 2014 accident report is provided by the National Transportation Safety Board. Published as an educational tool, it is intended to help pilots learn from the misfortunes of others.
He buys and airplane, doesn’t get checked out in it and then panics when it actually flew as it was designed to do during high speed taxi runs leading to multiple attempts to land it immediately finally driving it into a power line with which he was familiar. His driving privileges should be revoked for the common good. It’s fools like that who give GA a bad reputation.
Power line should not be allowed above ground near an airfield close enough to be a hazard to aircraft departing and arriving.
That guy doesn’t need to fly anything
He had 80 hr total flt time. He was practicing taxiing and was caught by surprise by the very low lift off speed resulting from VG’s. Frim the Docket report he seems to have made a credible effort to be cautious about learning this new (to him) aircraft. I agree some instruction would have/should have improved the likelihood of a successful transition from whatever he was trained in to this new machine. Based on the small amount of info offered in the GANews article and the NTSB Docket it’s not clear that the pilot was negligent. He was only ignorant.