LAX02LA158 · Piper PA-22-135
Piper PA-22-135 · Accident: loss of control on ground/water during landing
From 4SD · Reno, NV to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX02LA158
- 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-22-135
- 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
- N3772A
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From 4SD · Reno, NVTo not recorded
- 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 tail-wheel equipped airplane veered off runway 8 and ground looped while landing with a 4-knot left crosswind component. The pilot stated that he intended to do a few pattern circuits to practice takeoffs and landings. The accident happened on the first landing. Just after touchdown, the airplane hit what the pilot described as some sort of hump in the pavement and bounced up in the air again. He added some power to cushion the touchdown and the airplane veered off the runway and into the infield area. It touched down in the dirt and he was unable to regain control before the airplane ground looped. The pilot said he is not certain, but he thinks he may have encountered a gust of wind that helped induce the loss of control. He stated that there were no mechanical malfunctions or failures that preceded the loss of control. An FAA inspector reported that there is a small hump in the pavement near the approach end of runway 8.
Probable cause
Failure of the pilot to maintain directional control. A factor was the hump in the runway.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX02LA158
- Event ID
- 20020515X00681
- Case number
- LAX02LA158
- 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: 36fb442a9061473a4dfebd4363094b5c97fccfe13e84a875b1324ede3c2efe8e; retrieved 2026-09-22T10:56:48.414Z.