DEN99LA132 · Piper PA-28-180
Piper PA-28-180 · Accident: loss of control in flight during initial climb
From Chloride Airport (NM51) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- DEN99LA132
- 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-28-180
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-28
- 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
- N7521W
- Operator
- Wayne E. Huyler · private individual
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Chloride Airport (NM51), NMTo 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
- Initial climb
- 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
- Also codedOther events the NTSB coded in the sequence, such as a wire strike after a loss of power. Flight Findings uses them for its kinds of event. Glossary
- Stall/mush
- 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 › Rotation, excessive
- Pilot in command › Stall/mush, inadvertent
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot was departing the runway with the intention of performing touch and go landings. He stated that during takeoff, he rotated the airplane at a speed of 65 mph. He looked outside of the cockpit and noticed that the airplane was only 15 ft. above the runway. He verified that the airspeed indicated 65 mph. He leveled the nose of the airplane, and it impacted the runway. He hit his head against the panel, then felt a second impact. That was the last memory the pilot had regarding the accident. Several witnesses observed the airplane rotating at a very high angle of attack. One witness noted that the nose appeared to be pitched up at an angle of 15 to 20 degrees. The witnesses observed the airplane veer to the north side of the runway, then realign with the runway, and drift right again. The aircraft impacted several landing lights off the north side of the runway, then struck a dirt berm, followed by a barb-wire fence. At the time of the accident, the pilot had flown a total of 2.1 hours within the past 90 days, and had accumulated a total of 4.5 hours of flight time in the PA-28. Density altitude at the time of the accident was calculated to be 8,891 feet.
Probable cause
The pilot's excessive rotation during takeoff, resulting in an inadvertent stall/mush. Factors were the pilot's lack of recent flight experience, and the high density altitude..
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DEN99LA132
- Event ID
- 20001212X19255
- Case number
- DEN99LA132
- 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: 69040fcb2f7a45a2439eceed0a0f2233693905bda2a6f924ff6b3793aa63e424; retrieved 2026-09-21T20:26:59.600Z.