DEN01LA054 · Piper PA-32-300
Piper PA-32-300 · Accident: in flight collision with terrain/water during landing
From City of Colorado Springs Municipal Airport (COS) to Angel Fire Airport (AXX)
Event
- NTSB case
- DEN01LA054
- 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-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
- N3051U
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From City of Colorado Springs Municipal Airport (COS), Colo. Springs, COTo Angel Fire Airport (AXX), Angel Fire, NM
- 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 · aborted
- 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 terrain/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
- Pilot in command › Aircraft control, not maintained
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
As the airplane approached runway 35, the pilot applied "full cross control" for the crosswind that the airport reported to be from 260 degrees at 20 knots and gusting. Wind gusts were reportedly between 24 and 30 knots. When the airplane touched down 4,500 feet past the threshold, "a strong gust of wind" pushed the airplane to the right side of the runway and the pilot aborted the landing. During the abort, the nose landing gear was damaged when it struck a 24-inch high snow bank at the 5,900-foot mark. Witnesses said the airplane nearly "cartwheeled." The pilot turned the airplane around and landed on runway 17. The airplane touched down at the 6,150-foot mark and skidded on its nose to a halt at the 7,100-foot mark (8,900 foot runway). The airplane's demonstrated crosswind component is 17 knots. The computed crosswind component was 90 degrees at 20 knots, 24 knots, or 30 knots, depending on the reported wind velocity used.
Probable cause
the pilot's failure to maintain control of the airplane during landing. Contributing factors were the crosswind, the pilot exceeding the published maximum demonstrated crosswind component, and the snow bank.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DEN01LA054
- Event ID
- 20010223X00507
- Case number
- DEN01LA054
- 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: 6425e64ecb77301efba5ffaf098f9c805e4ad91c56da8ea59edc52b2691910c4; retrieved 2026-09-22T12:09:10.388Z.