CHI97LA182 · Champion 7ECA
Champion 7ECA · Accident: hard landing
From Bird Field (2MO1) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI97LA182
- 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
Champion 7ECA
- Aircraft type
- Champion 7
- 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
- N7506F
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Bird Field (2MO1)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 › Remedial action, delayed
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
As the airplane approached the runway threshold, the private pilot, according to the flight instructor, reduced the power. The instructor said he felt the airplane begin to sink more than he thought it should. He said he told the pilot to add power. The instructor said he tried to apply power and felt the pilot opposing his attempt to move the throttle. A witness said the airplane approached the runway '...slow and too low.' He said the airplane flared to high and stalled about 20 feet above the ground. He said he heard the power increase just before the airplane made the hard landing. The instructor said he had never flown this type airplane from the rear seat before this flight. He said he had acquired about 12 hours in airplanes similar to the accident airplane. He was unable to recall how long it had been since he last flew an airplane similar to the accident airplane.
Probable cause
remedial action delayed by the flight instructor. A factor in this accident was the instructor's lack of recent experience in this type airplane.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI97LA182
- Event ID
- 20001208X08095
- Case number
- CHI97LA182
- 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: 0ab0a966537fddecd91e839af5d8f36a3bb019c35d147ba37a7587429fd41f7f; retrieved 2026-09-21T21:24:53.788Z.