DEN02LA073 · Piper PA-28-140
Air Center of Salt Lake Piper PA-28-140 · Accident: in flight collision with terrain/water en route
From Bolinder Field Tooele Valley Airport (TVY) to U42 · Salt Lake City, UT
Event
- NTSB case
- DEN02LA073
- 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-28-140
- 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
- N4690R
- Operator
- Air Center of Salt Lake
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Bolinder Field Tooele Valley Airport (TVY), Toole, UTTo U42 · Salt Lake City, UT
- 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
- En route · climb to cruise
- 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
- Pilot in command › Proper climb rate, not obtained/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 pilot said that after taking off, the airplane was "unable to climb." The airplane impacted a field approximately 1 mile south of the airport. The airport was at an elevation of 4,316 feet msl, and the temperature was said to be in the "high nineties." Weight and balance computations were made based on data submitted by the pilot. The airplane was within weight limits, but was 0.86 inches forward of the airplane's forward center of gravity limit. Rate of climb under these conditions was estimated to be about 350 feet per minute. Using the airplane's best rate of climb airspeed of 85 miles per hour, it was estimated that the airplane would climb approximately 247 feet per mile. The difference in elevation between the departure end of runway 16 and the accident site is about 150 feet.
Probable cause
the pilot-in-command failure to obtain/maintain proper rate of climb, resulting in a collision with terrain. Contributing factors were the high density altitude and exceeding the airplane's forward center of gravity limit.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DEN02LA073
- Event ID
- 20020716X01136
- Case number
- DEN02LA073
- 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: local date, investigation status, coordinates. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2002-07-14.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 6b3bb7d7e59a9bf827df51fcd5d84708e97c927a237419698077cd3d1b05a406; retrieved 2026-09-22T10:43:50.475Z.