Velocity SE RG — Titusville, FL

What happened

The pilot was conducting a personal flight in an experimental amateur-built airplane that he had owned for about 5 years before the accident. During short final approach, the airplane pitched up, climbed about 300 ft, descended nose down, and impacted a grass area next to the runway. A postcrash fire consumed most of the wreckage.

The elevator push-pull tube section that connected to the control stick was recovered with no threaded rod end engaged, and the rod end was not recovered. Metallurgical examination of the elevator push-pull tube section revealed no contact marks from the jam nut. Also, the first three threads in the threaded plug were missing. The threads had fractured in shear overstress, and likely resulted in the push pull tube separating during flight and the pilot’s subsequent loss of airplane control.

Review of the airplane kit assembly manual revealed instructions to have at least 0.5 inches of thread engagement with the rod end in the 1.5-inch threaded plug (with a note indicating that “all the way in is best”). Due to the lack of maintenance documentation, the investigation could not determine when or why the most recent adjustment to the rod end was made.

Toxicology testing identified doxylamine in the pilot’s specimens. The main effect from doxylamine that can degrade performance is sleepiness. Because sleepiness would not have likely led to the airplane’s sudden pitch up during landing, the pilot’s use of doxylamine likely did not contribute to the accident.

An editorial "what led to it / how to avoid it" analysis for this accident is generated separately and will appear here.