CHI00FA237 · Piper J-5A
Piper J-5A · Accident: loss of control on ground/water during takeoff
From an unrecorded airport to MO (private airstrip)
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI00FA237
- 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
Piper J-5A
- Aircraft type
- Piper J-5
- 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
- N600F
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo MO (private airstrip)
- 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
- Takeoff · roll/run
- 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
- Destroyed
Cause areas
- Pilot in command › Directional control, not maintained
- Pilot in command › Ground loop/swerve, inadvertent
Approximate · Estimated position: the centre of Belton, MO, the place the record names. Not the accident site.
NTSB narrative
The airport manager said that the student pilot arrived on the airport at around 1:30 to 2:00 p.m. He said that they conversed for a while, and then student pilot left. The airport manager said, "The airplane has no electrical system, so I hand-propped it to start. Then I came inside." The airport manager said that he didn't watch the takeoff roll. A witness was driving eastbound toward the airport when she saw "a yellow plane, very low, cross 195th [Street], going south." The witness said that as she got close to the crest of the hill on 195th street, she saw black smoke coming from the area south of where she was. The witness said that when she got to the top of the hill, where the end of the runway was, she saw black smoke and flames. She could not tell what was on fire. She thought that someone was burning something, so she went on her way. The witness said that when she saw the airplane cross over the road, it was not trailing any smoke or flames. An examination of the wreckage revealed no anomalies.
Probable cause
The student pilot not maintaining directional control during the takeoff roll resulting in the inadvertent ground loop.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI00FA237
- Event ID
- 20001212X21655
- Case number
- CHI00FA237
- 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: 2fba48451fb0912f32eaf31190c6c3b8a06dbdffbb8110b2bacf3adac0b48e7e; retrieved 2026-09-20T20:58:41.200Z.