SEA00LA136 · Ercoupe 415-D
Ercoupe 415-D · Accident: hard landing
From Missoula, MT (no airport) to 6S5
Event
- NTSB case
- SEA00LA136
- 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
- 1 · 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
Ercoupe 415-D
- Aircraft type
- Ercoupe 415
- 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
- N93835
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Missoula, MT (no airport)To 6S5
- 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 · flare/touchdown
- 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
- Hard landing
- 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 › Descent, excessive
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
Although the person piloting the aircraft had recently been issued a third class medical/student pilots certificate, he had not received instruction in an airplane for over 20 years, and did not have an endorsement to fly an airplane solo. Nevertheless, he undertook a flight to reposition the aircraft from his private airstrip to the location where he planned to take flight instruction. While attempting to land at that location, the pilot allowed the aircraft to contact the runway while in an excessive rate of descent. The impact was hard enough to collapse the nose gear, damage the firewall, shatter the gasculator bowl, fracture a fuel line fitting, and result in the aircraft bouncing back into the air. The aircraft then hit the runway hard a second time, whereupon it slid along the surface with flames emanating from the aft area of the engine compartment. By the time the aircraft came to a stop, much of the forward half was engulfed in flames. Although the pilot was able to exit the aircraft unassisted, he later succumbed to the extensive thermal injuries he sustained during the accident sequence.
Probable cause
The excessive rate at which the student pilot allowed the aircraft to descend into the runway surface while attempting to land. Factors include the pilot's lack of experience in airplanes.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record SEA00LA136
- Event ID
- 20001212X21611
- Case number
- SEA00LA136
- 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: a7880746e72e5ec4deab2213b86f02e6191e0d46380aa7eb4af47d50f419b88b; retrieved 2026-09-20T21:01:14.569Z.