IAD98LA108 · Piper PA-18-150
Piper PA-18-150 · Accident: loss of control on ground/water during landing
From Waterbury Oxford Airport (OXC) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- IAD98LA108
- 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-18-150
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-18
- 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
- N7236K
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Waterbury Oxford Airport (OXC)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 · 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, tailwheel › Separation
- Pilot in command › Directional control, not possible
Approximate · Estimated position: the centre of Oxford, CT, the place the record names. Not the accident site.
NTSB narrative
The pilot said he made a three point landing, and during the landing roll the aircraft drastically veered to the right. He said he tried to correct with power, but the aircraft impacted a brushy area veered off the right side of the runway down an embankment. Examination of the tailwheel revealed the right side tailwheel rudder spring was missing, while the left side was hanging and not connected. According to the airplane log books, the last annual inspection was completed on September 28, 1997. The airplane had accumulated over 6.5 hours since it was rebuilt in September 1997. Prior to the inspection, the last entry in the log book was dated in 1981.
Probable cause
The pilot's inability to maintain directional control during the landing roll due to separation of the tailwheel spring assembly.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record IAD98LA108
- Event ID
- 20001211X11081
- Case number
- IAD98LA108
- 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: c5beb47dd90d6aadf74fc8b626445820a5c4393eddfcc56df45aa41f0b86cbe6; retrieved 2026-09-22T16:48:40.771Z.