FTW97LA176 · Lockheed P-38L
Lone Star Flight Museum Lockheed P-38L · Accident: on ground/water collision with object while taxiing
From Scholes International At Galveston Airport (GLS) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- FTW97LA176
- 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
Lockheed P-38L
- Aircraft type
- Lockheed P-38
- 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
- N9005R
- Operator
- Lone Star Flight Museum
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Scholes International At Galveston Airport (GLS)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
- Taxi · to runway
- 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
- On ground/water collision with object
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Minor
Cause areas
- Pilot in command › Clearance, not maintained
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
After maintenance was performed on the Lockheed P-38L, it was to be test flown prior to an air show. The aircraft was towed to the ramp, and a ground operations person parked a cart to the left and rear of the left wing tip before the pilot arrived. The pilot did not note the cart during a 'walk around of the aircraft.' The ground operations person, who stood to the left of the aircraft while the pilot started the engines, noticed the aircraft's crew ladder was down, and proceeded to the rear of the aircraft and secured it. Another person, a ground marshal directed the pilot to move the aircraft from east to west. The airplane had not quite completed a 180 degree turn when the left propeller struck the parked cart. The pilot reported that he saw the parked cart just as the left propeller hit the cart.
Probable cause
failure of the pilot to maintain aircraft clearance from the ground vehicle.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record FTW97LA176
- Event ID
- 20001208X07905
- Case number
- FTW97LA176
- 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: 570a4773dc1444f3dc5cc04c0e04eee7dd60334a4f829896db019fc81cd714d8; retrieved 2026-09-21T12:07:37.154Z.