LAX02LA122 · Piper PA-22-160
Piper PA-22-160 · Accident: loss of control on ground/water during landing
From Beagle Sky Ranch Airport (OR96) to Nut Tree Airport (VCB)
Narrative check · The NTSB narrative appears to contradict this record's location. Values are shown as recorded, not corrected; compare with the narrative.
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX02LA122
- 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-22-160
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-22
- 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
- N8158D
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Beagle Sky Ranch Airport (OR96), Medford, ORTo Nut Tree Airport (VCB), Vacaville, CA
- 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 · landing roll
- 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
- Loss of control on ground/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 › Directional control, not maintained
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane nosed over after veering off the runway during landing. The pilot said the airplane is a conversion to the PA-22/20 conventional landing gear arrangement. He had just picked up the airplane after having it in the shop for the last couple of months for repair. He was landing on runway 20 with winds he described as from 100 degrees at 6 knots. After touchdown, he experienced directional control problems with the airplane first veering left and then right, and finally departing off the right side of the runway. The airplane was traveling at a slow speed and he applied both brakes to stop. The airplane then nosed over very slowly, damaging the vertical stabilizer. He stated there were no mechanical malfunctions or failures with the airplane. The pilot reported that his total time was 140 hours, with about 60 in the accident aircraft. Prior to departing from Medford, he obtained some dual instruction to review landing techniques in conventional gear airplanes. The official Vacaville aviation METAR at both 1453 and 1553 was reporting variable wind conditions at 3 to 4 knots.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain directional control.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX02LA122
- Event ID
- 20020403X00456
- Case number
- LAX02LA122
- 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, coordinates. 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: 6674fc773615491517846a43735bbab53823027ad64b6178f542ac5f585d32ec; retrieved 2026-09-22T11:02:27.039Z.