FTW01LA215 · Piper PA-28-235
Piper PA-28-235 · Accident: hard landing
From Mesquite Metro Airport (HQZ) to Airpark East Airport (1F7)
Event
- NTSB case
- FTW01LA215
- 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-28-235
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-28
- 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
- N235RM
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Mesquite Metro Airport (HQZ), Mesquite, TXTo Airpark East Airport (1F7), Terrell, TX
- 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 · flare/touchdown
- 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
- Hard landing
- 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
According to the pilot/owner, the purpose of the flight was for the two private pilots to practice short field and crosswind landings. The flight departed the originating airport after both pilots practiced touch-and-go takeoffs and landings, and proceeded to another airport. Upon arrival the pilot/owner executed one touch-and-go, then the other pilot took control of the airplane to practice another touch-and-go. The pilot/owner reported that the other pilot was in the process of landing, when at the point of the landing flare, a "wind shear was encountered, which caused an immediate loss of lift and a hard touchdown." In a written statement and event diagram, the pilot/owner depicted the airplane landing adjacent to a tree line, which was upwind from the airplane's touchdown point. The pilot/owner reported the wind from the south at 8-10 knots. The closest weather observation facility reported the wind from 200 degrees at 8 knots.
Probable cause
the flying pilot's failure to maintain control of the airplane during the landing flare which resulted in a hard landing. A contributing factor was the wind shear weather condition.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record FTW01LA215
- Event ID
- 20011012X02080
- Case number
- FTW01LA215
- 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: 5992771f8bf103e844f92242890a87ec675452a6498769bfb244658e39355969; retrieved 2026-09-22T11:39:50.391Z.