NYC97LA078 · Piper PA-32-300
Piper PA-32-300 · Accident: hard landing
From Muñoz Landing Airstrip (BLM) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC97LA078
- Event typeAccident: someone killed or seriously injured, or the aircraft substantially damaged (NTSB definition). Incident: an occurrence that affected or could have affected safety, short of that. Glossary
- Accident
- InvestigationHow far the investigation had got when the record was published: preliminary, ongoing, final or completed. Unknown where the source does not say. Glossary
- Completed
- API-reported fatalities
- 0 · all aircraft and ground
- Ground fatalities
- 0
- OperationWhat kind of flying it was, grouped by the rules it flew under: airline (US Part 121), air taxi and commuter (Part 135), general aviation (Part 91 and similar), military or government. Glossary
- General aviation
- WeatherVisual meteorological conditions (VMC): good enough to fly by looking outside. Instrument conditions (IMC): cloud or low visibility, flying by instruments. Glossary
- Visual Meteorological Cond
Piper PA-32-300
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-32
- Category
- Airplane
- RegistrationThe aircraft's tail number, such as N12345 or G-ABCD. Registrations are reissued, so the same one years apart can be a different aircraft. Glossary
- N321HP
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Muñoz Landing Airstrip (BLM)To not recorded
- Aircraft age
- Not recorded
- Flight rulesThe regulations the flight operated under: in the US, Part 91 (general aviation), Part 121 (airlines), Part 135 (air taxi and commuter) and others; for flights abroad, the NTSB's coarser commercial or non-commercial code. Glossary
- Part 91: General Aviation
- Phase of flightThe stage of the flight when things started to go wrong: standing, taxi, takeoff, initial climb, en route, maneuvering, approach or landing. Glossary
- Landing · flare/touchdown
- First occurrenceThe single coded event the NTSB judges best describes what happened (records from 2008 on). Older records name the first occurrence in the sequence instead. Glossary
- Hard landing
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Pilot in command › Flare, improper
- Pilot in command › Planning/decision, improper
Approximate · Estimated position: the centre of Belmar, NJ, the place the record names. Not the accident site.
NTSB narrative
The student pilot (SP)/owner of the airplane stated he remained in the traffic pattern and performed three takeoffs and landings, each to a full stop. During his fourth approach to runway 32, the airplane landed on the nose wheel, bounced into the air, then landed again. During the second touchdown the nose gear collapsed. The SP then steered the airplane off the left side of the runway into sand resulting in further damage. The SP had accumulated about 54 hours of total flight experience, of which 46 hours was in make and model. The SP's total solo experience was 3.5 hours, all in make and model, 1 hour of which was the accident flight.
Probable cause
The student pilot's improper decision to taxi off the runway into sand after the nose gear collapsed. A factor in the accident was the student pilot's improper flare.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC97LA078
- Event ID
- 20001208X07816
- Case number
- NYC97LA078
- Dataset
- historical-pre2008
- Source SHA-256
- 89e2df6d848e7ab3b42e7d7c7a03ff403303057a26ca04c95b3ea67201c3ce74
Source notes (4)
- Unreviewed is an editorial label, not an investigation status. API-sourced is not report-checked or human-reviewed. Explicit event totals are used without summing aircraft injury tables; onboard allocation is withheld. Unknown values remain unknown. The operation category is mapped from the NTSB-reported FAR part and has not been reviewed.
- Filled from the NTSB case API where the bulk record had no value: investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date, which is the same as the UTC date the NTSB stores.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 113f44f7d542210b3a6a69f3e122c138aaf638629e265686490588712f1060cb; retrieved 2026-09-22T19:56:23.975Z.