CHI04CA117 · Piper PA-28RT-201
Piper PA-28RT-201 · Accident: undershoot on approach
From Dupage Airport (DPA) to DeKalb Taylor Municipal Airport (DKB)
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI04CA117
- 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-28RT-201
- 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
- N81898
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Dupage Airport (DPA), West Chicago, ILTo DeKalb Taylor Municipal Airport (DKB), DeKalb, 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
- Approach · VFR pattern final
- 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
- Undershoot
- 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
- Flightcrew › Proper touchdown point, not identified
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 struck a runway construction barricade during a simulated forced landing on runway 20. The runway 20 threshold had been relocated 600 feet towards the departure end because of an on-going runway construction project. Both the first 600 feet of the existing runway surface and the new pavement were marked with yellow painted chevrons, indicating those portions of pavement were closed for landing, takeoff, and taxing. The pilot stated he felt the airplane "was not going to make a landing on the existing runway and would probably touchdown on a section of the new part of the runway." The pilot stated he increased the engine power in order to arrest the descent, but the airplane touched-down on the new pavement. According to the certified flight instructor (CFI), while en route his student monitored the automated surface observing system and noted "runway 20 had a 600 foot displaced threshold." Prior to the accident approach the pilot performed two approaches, both of which were made to the closed section of runway 20. The CFI reported that on the accident approach the airplane experienced a hard landing near the intersection of the new and existing pavement sections. The CFI stated that he did not notice any construction barricades positioned at the end of runway 20. The airport manager reported that a runway construction barricade, originally positioned at the intersection of the existing pavement and new pavement sections, was damaged on the day of the accident. The broken portions of the barricade were distributed in a way consistent with an airplane hitting the barricade on landing approach.
Probable cause
The failure of the pilot and his flight instructor to identify the location of the relocated threshold and proper touchdown point, which resulted in the airplane striking the construction barricade while on approach. A factor to the accident was the construction barricade.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI04CA117
- Event ID
- 20040524X00645
- Case number
- CHI04CA117
- 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: d21400e5bcb2b55ea655f6a518acae53229ce0d4b7167f1faf6702608086ed06; retrieved 2026-09-22T07:36:05.769Z.