LAX00LA117 · Piper PA-46-310
Piper PA-46-310 · Accident: undershoot on approach
From Charles M. Schulz Sonoma County Airport (STS) to Palo Alto Airport (PAO)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX00LA117
- 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-46-310
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-46
- 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
- N43412
- Operator
- Joseph J. Grzebik · private individual
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Charles M. Schulz Sonoma County Airport (STS), Santa Rosa, CATo Palo Alto Airport (PAO)
- 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 pattern final
- 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
- Undershoot
- 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 › Proper glidepath, not obtained/maintained
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane landed approximately 2 feet short of the runway, and then struck the lip of the pavement, which sheered off the left main gear. The gear itself hung onto the trunnion by the brake lines until the airplane came to rest, approximately 600 feet down the runway. Additionally, the airplane struck a taxiway sign with the left wing while it was traveling down the runway. The pilot told investigators that he was planning on landing on runway 30 and was using 85 knots as his target speed. He said that about 100 feet agl he noticed that he had an excessive sink rate and noticed that his airspeed was about 97 knots. He decided to trade his airspeed to cut the sink rate and said by the time he noticed it wasn't working, he was already on the ground.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to obtain/maintain the proper visual glide path resulting in an undershoot and collision with the runway edge.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX00LA117
- Event ID
- 20001212X20668
- Case number
- LAX00LA117
- 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: 73244ff02a3b3ad29b476908ad42ab167b3a0f4bab09bff62053088a672adf67; retrieved 2026-09-22T13:05:34.046Z.