SEA98LA136 · Piper PA-32-300
Piper PA-32-300 · Accident: loss of control on ground/water during landing
From Bismarck Municipal Airport (BIS) to Great Falls International Airport (GTF)
Event
- NTSB case
- SEA98LA136
- 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
- CGDBT
- Operator
- Cribb, Jim · private individual
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Bismarck Municipal Airport (BIS), Bismarck, NDTo Great Falls International Airport (GTF)
- 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 · landing roll
- 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
- Loss of control on ground/water
- 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
- Landing gear, nose gear › Overload
- Pilot in command › Remedial action, improper
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot was executing a landing to runway 21 at the Great Falls International airport and reported that 'approximately 10 to 15 feet above the runway, the plane dropped suddenly, hitting the runway hard and starting a series of bounces-each bounce progressively higher-that I attempted to control with elevator and power. At the time, I was able to keep the plane straight down the runway but was being blown to the left by the cross wind. After the fourth bounce, I opted for a nose down landing in the face of my greater concern of leaving the runway and flipping the aircraft.' Tower controllers reported that they observed the aircraft begin porpoising with increasing severity during which the nose landing gear collapsed. The 1435 surface weather observation taken at the Great Falls International airport on the date of the accident reported winds from 230 degrees magnetic at 22 knots gusting to 30 knots.
Probable cause
The pilot-in-command's improper remedial action and overload of the nose landing gear. Contributing factors were gusty winds and a pilot-induced oscillation (porpoise).
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record SEA98LA136
- Event ID
- 20001211X10717
- Case number
- SEA98LA136
- 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: 03d3712c408deecd6e58e83b21560ce3c5fca3df239a79d730f50a7ba4e01255; retrieved 2026-09-22T17:30:23.142Z.