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In February 2021, an experimental Velocity Vtwin lifted off from a Wisconsin airport on a ferry flight to have its landing gear fixed — and a false instrument reading set a chain of events in motion that neither pilot could reverse.

The twin-engine, pusher-configuration Velocity Vtwin was flying a Part 91 ferry leg under an FAA Special Flight Permit, bound for Florida for landing gear maintenance. That permit carried a critical limitation: the retractable gear had to remain extended for the entire flight. Two pilots were aboard as the airplane departed Southern Wisconsin Regional Airport near Janesville.

Shortly after takeoff, a pilot radioed the tower to report an engine problem and asked to circle back and land, declining any assistance. What the crew was almost certainly seeing was a red "X" on the Garmin G3X left engine oil pressure indication — the product of a damaged wiring harness on the oil pressure sending unit, not an actual engine failure. Believing the left engine had malfunctioned, they shut down a perfectly healthy engine.

Now operating on a single engine and maneuvering to return, the airplane accelerated to roughly 16 knots past the maximum landing-gear-extended speed (VLE). The NTSB determined that the exceedance of maximum airspeed with the gear extended caused the right main landing gear door to separate; it then struck the right propeller and destroyed it, producing a total loss of right engine power, with the damaged oil pressure sending unit wiring — which gave the false malfunction indication that prompted the precautionary shutdown of the left engine — cited as a contributing factor. With both engines now inoperative, the airplane no longer had the energy to glide back to the runway.

The controller watched it turn toward the field, bank steepening, until it dropped from sight. The airplane came to rest inverted in a river about a mile south of the airport. The pattern here is a hard one: a benign wiring fault masqueraded as an engine emergency, and the response to that phantom failure — combined with an overspeed against a placarded limitation — turned a flyable airplane into an unrecoverable one.

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SOURCES

NTSB Accident ID: CEN21FA130

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ABOUT PILOT DEBRIEF

Pilot Debrief is hosted by Hoover, a retired F-15E pilot and current pilot for a major U.S. airline. Every video on this channel analyzes publicly released NTSB final reports, factual narratives, CVR/FDR transcripts, and docket evidence to extract practical safety lessons for general aviation pilots. We do not speculate beyond the evidence. We do not blame pilots for being human. We debrief the decisions and the systems, not the people.

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