Custom Air Transport Boeing 727-2M7 accident
Boeing 727-2M7 · Accident: dragged wing, rotor, pod, float or tail/skid on approach
From Montluçon-Guéret Airport (MCU) to El Paso International Airport (ELP)
Event
- NTSB case
- FTW04LA225
- 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
- Airline
- 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
Boeing 727-2M7
- Aircraft type
- Boeing 727
- 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
- N742RW
- Operator
- Custom Air Transport
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Montluçon-Guéret Airport (MCU), ChihuahuaTo El Paso International Airport (ELP), El Paso, TX
- 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 121: Air Carrier
- 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
- Dragged wing, rotor, pod, float or tail/skid
- 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
- Copilot/second pilot › Aircraft 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 950-hour first officer was at the airplanes controls during the approach and initial touchdown of the airplane to runway 4 (a 12,010 foot long by 150 foot wide asphalt runway). The right wing dragged the runway while the airplane was on a heading of 050 degrees and in a 19-degree right wingtip low bank angle. A left correction was initiated and the airplane then rolled to a left wing low angle of 13 degrees and overshot the runway centerline back to the left. During the correction back to the right, the airplane bounced "hard" with the main landing gear touching down on the runway 2,150 feet beyond where the right wing dragged the ground. The 5,000-hour captain then took over the controls and completed a "safe" landing. The wind at the time of the accident was from 140 degrees at 07 knots.
Probable cause
The first officer's failure to maintain aircraft control. Contributing factors were the captain's delayed remedial action and the crosswind.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record FTW04LA225
- Event ID
- 20040902X01347
- Case number
- FTW04LA225
- 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 2004-08-31.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 3a66981faf276358abdc4ca397b77e71e1097b9e98733d1d1b81f411f462f74c; retrieved 2026-09-18T15:17:15.970Z.