IAD02LA025 · Piper PA-28-180
Eagle East Aviation Piper PA-28-180 · Accident: in flight collision with object during initial climb
From Lawrence Municipal Airport (LWM) to Southbridge Municipal Airport (3B0)
Event
- NTSB case
- IAD02LA025
- 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-28-180
- 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
- N3997R
- Operator
- Eagle East Aviation
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Lawrence Municipal Airport (LWM), Lawrence, MATo Southbridge Municipal Airport (3B0), Southbridge, MA
- 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
- Initial climb
- 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 object
- Also codedOther events the NTSB coded in the sequence, such as a wire strike after a loss of power. Flight Findings uses them for its kinds of event. Glossary
- Tree(s)
- 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 › Aborted landing, delayed
- Pilot in command › Clearance, not maintained
Approximate · Estimated position: the centre of Oxford, MA, the place the record names. Not the accident site.
NTSB narrative
The pilot was on a cross country flight when he became disoriented and misidentified the airport that he intended to land at with another airport located about 9 miles away. Both airports had the same runway alignment and Unicom frequency. The pilot performed a short field approach to runway 02, and landed about 1/3 of the way down the 2,097 foot long snow and patchy ice covered runway. He said that he "landed longer down the runway than he would have liked, and that was part of the problem." During the landing roll-out, the pilot said that he avoided hard braking due to the runway conditions. As the airplane came over a rise, he noticed a snow bank located at the end of the runway and decided to abort the landing. With less than half of the runway length available, the pilot applied power and tried to establish a climb, but was unable to clear the trees. The pilot reported that there were no mechanical deficiencies. He also reported that the accident could have been prevented by, "strict adherence to the flight plan...use of multiple characteristics to identify rural airports...[and] more precise execution of short-field procedure." A review of the Piper PA-28-180 takeoff performance charts revealed that the airplane would have needed approximately 1,625 feet to take off over a 50-foot obstacle on a paved, level, dry runway in zero wind conditions with 25 degrees of flaps extended, and full power applied before brake release.
Probable cause
The pilot's delayed aborted landing and his failure to attain obstacle clearance. The pilot's misjudgment of distance is a contributing factor.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record IAD02LA025
- Event ID
- 20020124X00126
- Case number
- IAD02LA025
- 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: ed55a418bbc002e8e13373cb23ab4a288d0657538ef4e1fa0a921a7be49c7a01; retrieved 2026-09-21T19:47:30.021Z.