CHI99FA003 · Piper PA-44-180
Piper PA-44-180 · Accident: loss of control in flight on approach
From Terre Haute Regional Airport, Hulman Field (HUF) to OZW
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI99FA003
- 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
- 2 · 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-44-180
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-44
- 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
- N3040A
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Terre Haute Regional Airport, Hulman Field (HUF), Terre Haute, INTo OZW
- 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
- Approach · VFR go-around
- 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 in flight
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Destroyed
Cause areas
- Pilot in command › Airspeed(vmc), not maintained
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
A pilot at the accident airport said he heard '...a pilot announce: 'Livingston, downwind 31, engine out.' Also, witnesses reported the airplane executing a go-around while over the approach threshold of runway 31, and a flight instructor witness said he saw the twin-engine airplane flying over an airplane that was on its landing roll. He said the twin-engine airplane was about 100 feet above the airplane on its landing roll. He said the airplane was '...nose high and flying about 60 to 70 knots, it was wallowing and not gaining altitude or airspeed.... [It] drifted to the right of the runway, slightly right wing down and gained about 50 additional feet. The plane stalled, dropped the left wing and turned vertically down. The plane hit nearly straight down....' Other witnesses confirmed what the flight instructor said and added the airplane's left engine's propeller was stopped. The on-scene investigation revealed no anomalies with the airframe, flight control system, or engines and accessories. According to the pilot's logbook, he flew the accident airplane 1.5 hours on September 23, 1998. The logbook showed that the next most recent flight in the model of accident airplane was November 27, 1996. The pilot who flew with the accident pilot on September 23, 1998, said, 'I felt he did the airwork OK. He did the Vmc demo correctly but didn't carry it through to the point of losing yaw control. The airspeed was... about 60 when he said 'that's it' and recovered, I don't believe he had full rudder into the good engine.'
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain/exceed the Vmc airspeed during a go-around maneuver. Contributing factors were the shutting down of the left engine and the lack of recent experience in the type operation.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI99FA003
- Event ID
- 20001211X11207
- Case number
- CHI99FA003
- 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: 2277289b2a77bcb55df65b13307adcedb90fae9d0599ad8e001a1b641b61f1f9; retrieved 2026-09-20T22:22:03.016Z.