CHI01LA201 · Piper J3-C65
Piper J3-C65 · Accident: dragged wing, rotor, pod, float or tail/skid during landing
From West Fargo Municipal Airport (D54) to Fargo, ND
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI01LA201
- 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 J3-C65
- Aircraft type
- Piper J3
- 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
- N3253N
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From West Fargo Municipal Airport (D54), Fargo, NDTo Fargo, ND
- 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
- 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
- Dragged wing, rotor, pod, float or tail/skid
- 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 › Preflight planning/preparation, inadequate
- Pilot in command › Unsuitable terrain or takeoff/landing/taxi area, selected
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The floatplane sustained substantial damage when it landed on a grass field, subsequently collapsing the float rigging and damaging the wing. The pilot reported, "... upon slide out, aircraft turned abruptly to line 90 degrees, side loading floats. Bending struts on floats, prop struck float, wingtip struck ground when float struts gave way." The pilot reported there were no mechanical malfunctions with the airplane. A witness who worked at the airport reported the grass field adjacent to the airport had been mowed so the pilot could land. He reported the pilot was the first person to land on the grass at that airport.
Probable cause
the pilot's inadequate preflight planning and the unsuitable landing area selected by the pilot. Additional factors were the uneven terrain and the failed float assembly in overload.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI01LA201
- Event ID
- 20010710X01352
- Case number
- CHI01LA201
- 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 2001-06-11.
- API snapshot SHA-256: af83fb2e0695ee234d33fd8acc07050c3305a7af9d20f73f7c4228ec10c3a4ac; retrieved 2026-09-22T11:53:00.145Z.