NYC00LA242 · Piper PA-32-300
Piper PA-32-300 · Accident: in flight collision with object on approach
From Penn Valley Airport (SEG) to Nantucket Memorial Airport (ACK)
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC00LA242
- 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
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
Piper PA-32-300
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-32
- 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
- N8133Z
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Penn Valley Airport (SEG), Selinsgrove, PATo Nantucket Memorial Airport (ACK)
- 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 · IFR final approach
- 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
- In flight collision with object
- 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 › Proper glidepath, not maintained
Approximate · Estimated position: the centre of Nantucket, MA, the place the record names. Not the accident site.
NTSB narrative
The pilot had been awake for most of the day. Prior to the flight, the pilot's wife had been injured and was medically treated and released from a hospital. The pilot and his wife departed on a visual flight rules flight plan and proceeded eastbound. As the airplane neared the destination airport, the pilot could see the entire island and airport, but filed an IFR flight plan with a Flight Service Station due to the "widely scattered, low, ground fog" in the area. While on an ILS approach, the pilot noticed that there was a patch of ground fog around the approach lights, but the entire runway surface and lights were visible. He then "descended early" and the right main landing gear struck an approach light stanchion, shearing the gear assembly off. The airplane touched down on the runway, slid about 200 feet, came to rest, and a fire ensued. Inspection of the instrument landing system the day after the accident revealed no anomalies. The weather about the time of the accident was, winds from 280 at 3 knots, 1/4 mile visibility, fog, vertical visibility 100 feet.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain the proper glide path to the runway. Factors related to the accident were the fog conditions and the pilot’s fatigue.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC00LA242
- Event ID
- 20001212X21849
- Case number
- NYC00LA242
- 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: local date, investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2000-08-26.
- API snapshot SHA-256: cc9f42ddaf56aa86497166e0f53211edba304b6c3f2d17e4f47e78b859e50b47; retrieved 2026-09-22T12:31:04.840Z.