CHI02LA015 · Piper PA-28R-201
Piper PA-28R-201 · Accident: in flight collision with terrain/water on approach
From Dupont-Lapeer Airport (D95) to Dupont-Lapeer Airport (D95)
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI02LA015
- 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-28R-201
- 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
- N6899C
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Dupont-Lapeer Airport (D95), Lapeer, MITo Dupont-Lapeer Airport (D95), Lapeer, MI
- 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
- 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
- Dual student › Proper touchdown point, not attained
- Pilot in command(cfi) › Remedial action, not performed
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane landed short of the runway during an instructional flight for a complex airplane endorsement. The flight instructor reported his safety recommendations as: change the runway aiming point for students, be more forceful with increase power requests, and review procedures with students during preflight. According to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) inspector, the flight instructor's medical certificate was expired. The flight instructor previously received a warning letter from the FAA on September 1, 1999 for instructing and acting as pilot-in-command without a valid medical certificate. The owner of the flight school where the instructor was employed stated that he does not check the validity of his flight instructors' pilot or medical certificate information and was unaware that the accident flight instructor did not possess a valid medical certificate.
Probable cause
the touchdown aim point not attained by the pilot rated student and the remedial action not performed by the flight instructor.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI02LA015
- Event ID
- 20011031X02175
- Case number
- CHI02LA015
- 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: 42f3d34ca8b41d0ef505c0ae49ae933a7bfd9ec6a52e675b5bae291fab252fd5; retrieved 2026-09-22T11:28:37.026Z.