MIA04FA086 · Piper PA-32-260
Piper PA-32-260 · Accident: loss of control in flight during landing
From Venice Municipal Airport (KVNC) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- MIA04FA086
- 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
- 1 · 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-32-260
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-32
- 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
- N3331W
- Operator
- Ricky C. Unger · private individual
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Venice Municipal Airport (KVNC), Venice, FLTo 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 · 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
- Loss of control in flight
- Also codedOther events the NTSB coded in the sequence, such as a wire strike after a loss of power. Flight Findings uses them for its kinds of event. Glossary
- Stall
- 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 › Remedial action, improper
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's wife stated that at the time of the accident she was at the Venice Airport, standing near the hangar where they keep the airplane. She observed her husband doing touch and go landings to runway 22. Just prior to the accident her husband approached to land on runway 22. The airplane never touched down on the runway. As the airplane neared the runway she observed it do a slight lift back up to about the height of a 2 1/2 story building. The right wing then raised up and the left wing dropped down. She stopped watching the airplane and ran to a person at another hangar to call for help. She does not recall the engine sounds. There were some other airplanes taking off before her husband but they had left the area. At the time of the accident there were no other airplanes flying in the area. Examination of the wreckage did not reveal any discrepancies with the aircraft structure, flight controls, aircraft systems, engine assembly, engine components, or propeller. Postmortem examination of the pilot and toxicology testing showed no evidence which could be considered causal to the accident.
Probable cause
Failure of the pilot to recover from an improper landing flare resulting in his failure to maintain airspeed (Vs), an inadvertant stall, loss of control, and inflight collision with terrain during an uncontrolled descent.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record MIA04FA086
- Event ID
- 20040601X00703
- Case number
- MIA04FA086
- 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: f8f69b45ada421ce1b0006a61fdacd66159f3f18dd62ba8c4f4c7763cc7c8fd6; retrieved 2026-09-20T18:28:37.091Z.