LAX00LA309 · Piper PA-18-150
Piper PA-18-150 · Accident: loss of control on ground/water during landing
From Glendale Municipal Airport (GEU) to Sundsvall-Härnösand Airport (SDL)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX00LA309
- 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-18-150
- 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
- N91003
- Operator
- Howard C. Fisk · private individual
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Glendale Municipal Airport (GEU), Glendale, AZTo Sundsvall-Härnösand Airport (SDL)
- 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
- Flight control, flap › Not activated
- Pilot in command › Aborted landing, attempted
- Pilot in command › Directional control, not maintained
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane landed hard and ground looped. On the landing rollout the right wing and landing gear were lifted by wind. The airplane veered to the left. The pilot leveled the airplane and attempted to regain directional control with rudder input. He aborted the landing because he thought he was going to ground loop. He added full power but did not retract the flaps. Once airborne he maneuvered to avoid a taxi light and attempted to regain runway heading. The airplane lost lift and landed hard. The pilot noted no mechanical malfunctions with the flight control (rudder) or brake systems.
Probable cause
Failure of the pilot to maintain directional control on the landing rollout. Also causal to the accident was his failure to retract flaps during the aborted landing attempt, which lead to a loss of lift and a hard landing followed by a ground loop.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX00LA309
- Event ID
- 20001212X21780
- Case number
- LAX00LA309
- 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: 17a6f849c53a94c2af0440aa1b1641a5422e48ce13fc35dc51b2a601ff653fa7; retrieved 2026-09-22T12:32:32.182Z.