DEN99LA162 · Piper PA-22-135
Piper PA-22-135 · Accident: loss of control on ground/water during landing
From Larned Pawnee County Airport (LQR) to Greeley–Weld County Airport (GXY)
Event
- NTSB case
- DEN99LA162
- 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-22-135
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-22
- 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
- N3329A
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Larned Pawnee County Airport (LQR), Larned, KSTo Greeley–Weld County Airport (GXY)
- 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
- Pilot in command › Ground loop/swerve, inadvertent
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot said that he was landing on runway 35 with a right quartering tailwind of 6 knots. The landing appeared normal until about 40 to 45 knots when the airplane began drifting to the left of centerline. He said that he corrected the airplane back to the centerline, and then it suddenly ground looped to the right. The pilot said that there was a 3 to 4 inch high dirt berm along the side of the runway. He said that when his left main landing gear and tail wheel impacted this berm, they folded under the airplane. He further stated that the rubber skid marks on the runway indicated that the tail wheel was oscillating, or shimmying. The maintenance person who recovered the airplane said that the self-centering tail wheel locking device was 'well lubricated,' which is what the maintenance manual calls for. He said the aerial application pilots that fly airplanes with similar tail wheel self-centering devices always instruct him not to lubricate their self-centering devices when he performs maintenance on their aircraft. They told him that it was easier to land in a crosswind when their tail wheel self-centering devices were dry.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadvertent ground loop during landing roll. Factors were the malfunctioning self centering locking device on the tail wheel, the right rear quartering tail wind, and the 3 to 4 inch high berm along the edge of the runway.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DEN99LA162
- Event ID
- 20001212X19740
- Case number
- DEN99LA162
- 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: 36dc92ebe1bbb06412b7cd02c49c9e714c4780872338428f8ed63d6b2dd66447; retrieved 2026-09-22T14:08:20.815Z.