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NYC04CA091 · Piper PA-28-180

24 Mar 2004 · Norwood, MA, United States

Piper PA-28-180 · Accident: hard landing

From Norwood Memorial Airport (OWD) to Norwood Memorial Airport (OWD)

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Event

NTSB case
NYC04CA091
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
N6535J
Operator
Unknown
Onboard fatalities
Unknown
Route
From Norwood Memorial Airport (OWD), Norwood, MATo Norwood Memorial Airport (OWD), Norwood, 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
Landing · flare/touchdown
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
Hard landing
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 › Recovery from bounced landing, not performed

Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.

NTSB narrative

The student pilot was conducting her first unsupervised solo flight, and was practicing takeoffs and landings on a 4,008-foot-long, 100-foot-wide, asphalt runway. She had completed approximately 17 landings prior to the accident; however, during the next landing attempt, her approach was high, and when the airplane contacted the runway, it landed harder, and bounced higher, than usual. The airplane began to porpoise, the propeller struck the runway, and the nose gear collapsed. The airplane then departed the right side of the runway and struck a snow bank. The student pilot did not experience any mechanical problems. She reported 49.2 hours of total flight experience, all in the make and model of the accident airplane.

Probable cause

The student pilot failure to recover from a bounced landing. A factor in this accident was the student pilot's lack of solo flight experience.

Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset

Sources

NTSB record NYC04CA091
Event ID
20040419X00481
Case number
NYC04CA091
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: 10c83ce87ab3e708eaf8772d0c2a24393626e39b0af9ccecf1f35f7aa425f261; retrieved 2026-09-22T07:49:33.029Z.