SEA00LA114 · Piper PA-18A-150
Piper PA-18A-150 · Accident: loss of control on ground/water during landing
From Ephrata Municipal Airport (EPH) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- SEA00LA114
- 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-18A-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
- N6775B
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Ephrata Municipal Airport (EPH)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
- Pilot in command › Directional control, not maintained
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot-in-command, a commercial pilot, was getting checked out on a glider club tow plane by the glider club's 'check out pilot', a Canadian citizen with a Canadian glider pilot license and Canadian private pilot certificate valid for single-engine land airplanes (but whose U.S. private pilot certificate carried only a glider rating.) The pilots reported that about 100 feet into the landing roll from a steep approach (which the 'check out' pilot reported was a typical tow plane approach profile due to tow rope considerations), which began smoothly, the plane's left wing lifted and the plane began to veer to the right. The pilot-in-command reported that he unsuccessfully attempted to correct the motion with up to full left rudder, and both pilots reported that the 'check out' pilot applied power, but the plane continued up to about 90 degrees to the right of the runway heading, the plane's left gear broke, and the airplane's left wing contacted the ground. The operator's NTSB accident report indicated that no mechanical malfunction or failure was involved in the accident.
Probable cause
The pilot-in-command's failure to maintain directional control during landing roll.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record SEA00LA114
- Event ID
- 20001212X21343
- Case number
- SEA00LA114
- 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: 6c9915fe304673d14a538801a3c5b50c23b461b158ee475a75d4ca72da615a1c; retrieved 2026-09-22T12:46:31.459Z.