CHI02LA126 · Piper PA 28-181
Piper PA 28-181 · Accident: on ground/water collision with object during landing
From Lake in the Hills Airport (3CK) to Woodlake Landing Airport (IS65)
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI02LA126
- 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 28-181
- 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
- N276U
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Lake in the Hills Airport (3CK), Lake in Hills, ILTo Woodlake Landing Airport (IS65), Sandwich, IL
- 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
- On ground/water collision with object
- 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
- Driver of vehicle › Visual lookout, inadequate
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 sustained substantial damage when the aircraft and an automobile collided on the runway. According to the pilot, after he landed he noticed an automobile about one-third of the way down the runway that was moving from left to right across the active runway. The pilot reported that the car continued to move steadily and that he applied full brakes and steered to the right to avoid hitting the car. The Sandwich Police Department estimated that the airplane skidded for 230 feet before the vehicle struck the aircraft about 800 feet down the runway. The driver of the automobile reported that he could not see the landing aircraft because of the sun and that he had recently had cataract surgery.
Probable cause
The driver of the automobile improperly drove his automobile on the active runway and did not maintain visual lookout for landing aircraft.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI02LA126
- Event ID
- 20020524X00734
- Case number
- CHI02LA126
- 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: e13d30060784795c2bc7a02174f35ab0f43a846fa05e9a8e40c0a8e8de66046f; retrieved 2026-09-22T10:57:04.158Z.