CHI05FA053 · Piper PA-23-250
Piper PA-23-250 · Accident: overrun during landing
From Boone County Airport (HRO) to Eureka Springs, AR (private airstrip)
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI05FA053
- 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
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
Piper PA-23-250
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-23
- 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
- N500KW
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Boone County Airport (HRO), Harrison, ARTo Eureka Springs, AR (private airstrip)
- 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
- Overrun
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Destroyed
Cause areas
- Pilot in command › Distance/speed, misjudged
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 was destroyed, and the pilot fatally injured, when it impacted trees and subsequently burned after an overrun during landing. A witness reported that the airplane came into the private airstrip very fast and that the weather at the time consisted of a low ceiling, rain, and misting rain. A postaccident examination of the airplane revealed no pre-impact anomalies. Evidence of heavy braking and sliding of the tires on the wet, turf runway was observed leading to the main wreckage. Tire marks indicated that the airplane touched down with 1,523 feet of runway remaining. The total runway length was 1,981 feet. The dry runway landing distance over a 50 foot obstacle with no wind was determined to be about 1,400 feet for an aircraft weight of 4,000 pounds.
Probable cause
The pilot misjudged his distance/speed which resulted in the overrun and subsequent impact with trees. The wet turf runway and the trees were factors in the accident.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI05FA053
- Event ID
- 20050121X00091
- Case number
- CHI05FA053
- 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: 421fb1989ef2df397604cb9afc022a235bab3ac448568b91b012c2535069e983; retrieved 2026-09-20T18:09:00.696Z.