DEN01LA010 · Otero-Pitts PT1
Otero-Pitts PT1 · Accident: undershoot on approach
From 4AC to 4AC
Event
- NTSB case
- DEN01LA010
- 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
Otero-Pitts PT1
- Aircraft type
- Otero Pitts PT1
- 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
- N47BS
- Operator
- Kaern S. Aaberg · private individual
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From 4ACTo 4AC
- 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 · VFR pattern final
- 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
- Undershoot
- 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 › Design stress limits of aircraft, exceeded
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
While on a local flight, conducting touch-and-go landings, the pilot, who was considering buying the aircraft, allowed the aircraft to touch down short of the runway. The airplane bounced and landed hard about 100 feet onto the runway. The main landing gear collapsed and the aircraft skidded to a halt with damage to the lower wing, engine, propeller, and engine mounts. The pilot was inexperienced in make and model aircraft and did not possess a medical certificate as required in the United States when operating on a foreign equivalent issued license and flying a United States registered aircraft.
Probable cause
A hard landing, which exceeded the design stress limits of the aircraft. Factors were the pilot's lack of experience in aircraft make and model and improper recovery from a bounced landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DEN01LA010
- Event ID
- 20001212X22146
- Case number
- DEN01LA010
- 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: 9a8a53f4f0e28a8ebf2bac6c6442d56eef7d1b700f258632b96f96b359ab357f; retrieved 2026-09-22T12:21:07.892Z.