LAX01LA077 · Piper PA-22-150
Piper PA-22-150 · Accident: loss of control on ground/water during landing
From Castle Airport (MER) to Castle Airport (MER)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX01LA077
- 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
- Unknown
- 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-22-150
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-22
- 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
- N3854P
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Castle Airport (MER), AtwaterTo Castle Airport (MER), Atwater, CA
- 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
- Dual student › Directional control, not maintained
- Pilot in command › Compensation for wind conditions, improper
- Pilot in command(cfi) › Supervision, inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
During an instructional flight, the pilot handling the flight controls ground looped his airplane while landing on runway 31. Prior to the accident, the pilot had successfully performed a series of takeoffs and 3-point landings under the supervision of his flight instructor. However, a wind gust was encountered during the pilot's last landing. The pilot indicated that he was unable to maintain directional control, the airplane veered left, the right main landing gear collapsed, and the right wing contacted the runway surface and broke. The flight instructor indicated that, at the time, the wind was from the southwest at 10 knots, with 15-knot gusts. The pilot held a commercial pilot certificate and had about 5,000 hours of flight time, but only about 2 hours in his recently purchased tail wheel equipped airplane. The flight instructor, whom the pilot hired to check him out, had 3,469.7 hours of flight time. However, his flying experience in the accident airplane was 5 hours. Runway 31 is 11,802 feet long and 300 feet wide.
Probable cause
The student's failure to maintain directional control while landing in a crosswind, his improper compensation for wind conditions, and the flight instructor's inadequate flight supervision.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX01LA077
- Event ID
- 20010120X00333
- Case number
- LAX01LA077
- 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, coordinates. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2001-01-14.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 4f3c5a95b3f5aa2e09b9145944e825c8a4645383ad4a976a2c83c34d9e042f5f; retrieved 2026-09-22T12:13:56.104Z.