The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) said kit planes were 2.5 times more likely to crash than similar commercially built aircraft. Reporting upon a number of Lancair 320 crashes in recent years, the ATSB commented that Lancair aircraft stall at higher speeds than similar, commercially-built aircraft and have higher rates of descent when a stall occurs.

Ron Bertram, president of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA), was killed while testing a Lancair 360 kit plane at Sydney's Bankstown Airport on April 5 last year. Mr Bertram, the plane's sole occupant, was conducting test flights of his single-engine, amateur-built Lancair 360 when it stalled after takeoff. At an altitude below 150m, witnesses heard the plane stall, bank hard to the right, regain power, bank again, then descend steeply until it crashed into one of the airport's taxiways. The report was inconclusive as to what caused fuel loss to the engine but ruled out lack of fuel or poor-quality fuel. Many of these power loss accidents are attributable to sudden onset carburetor icing.

Five days earlier, the male pilot of a Lancair 320 kit plane was killed when it stalled and ploughed into trees and finished up in waist-deep waters at Coopers Plains, in suburban Brisbane. The latest report criticized safety regulations training for pilots of all small planes when confronted with such a stall. It also highlighted the unique characteristics of the Lancair planes in such situations. The Lancair's pilot operating handbook and airplane flight manual state: "(The) Lancair is a very slick aircraft, thus speeds increase very rapidly during descents, stalls or incipient spins and you will consume great amounts of altitude during recovery". Re-interpret that as essentially saying that, at lower altitudes, there is no possibility of recovery.

While the ATSB statistics showed that kit planes accident rates were 2.5 times more than similar, commercially produced planes between 1995 to 2005, only a low number of amateur-built planes were now in operation and so accident rates appeared, somewhat deceptively perhaps, to be in decline.