ATL04LA114 · Piper PA-46-350P
Piper PA-46-350P · Accident: loss of control on ground/water during landing
From Montgomery Regional (Dannelly Field) Airport (MGM) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ATL04LA114
- 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-46-350P
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-46
- 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
- N91734
- Operator
- Howard M. Robertson · private individual
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Montgomery Regional (Dannelly Field) Airport (MGM), Montgomery, ALTo 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 › Compensation for wind conditions, inadequate
- 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 pilot landed on runway 28 with a crosswind from the left. After touchdown, the airplane yawed to the left. The pilot started correcting for the yaw but the correction felt to be too strong for the airplane to handle. The pilot allowed the airplane to drift to the left, eventually departing the runway on the left side onto the grass. Twenty yards from the runway, the nose gear dug into the soft grass and collapsed. Examination of the airplane revealed the nose gear collapsed, the propeller broken and damage to the firewall. The right main landing gear and the right wing tip were also bent. The nose gear trunnion was sent to the NTSB Materials Laboratory for a fracture analysis. The trunnion from the nose gear assembly was examined and the fracture faces contained no evidence of a fatigue crack or other preexisting condition leading to the fracture. According to the pilot's handbook the, the demonstrated crosswind component for the Piper PA-46-350P is 17 knots. The reported surface winds at the time of the accident were 200 degrees at 10 knots. The pilot's had accumulated a total of 1300 hours in the PA-46.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadequate compensation for wind and his failure to maintain directional control during landing roll that resulted in the collapse of the nose gear. The crosswind was a contributing factor.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ATL04LA114
- Event ID
- 20040518X00608
- Case number
- ATL04LA114
- 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: 0094cefbc4d419050b6e6c2cdb146feb5b85be40343270b56cba3a1c03f90c16; retrieved 2026-09-21T19:17:07.943Z.