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DEN06LA076 · Piper PA-46-350P

12 May 2006 · Del Norte, CO, United States

Piper PA-46-350P · Accident: hard landing

From Fort Worth Meacham International Airport (FTW) to 8V1 · Del Norte, CO

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Event

NTSB case
DEN06LA076
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
N41827
Operator
Unknown
Onboard fatalities
Unknown
Route
From Fort Worth Meacham International Airport (FTW), Fort Worth, TXTo 8V1 · Del Norte, CO
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
Hard landing
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

  • Airspeed › Low
  • Pilot in command › Stall, inadvertent

Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.

NTSB narrative

The pilot had been taught to fly a "high and hot final" approach. He made his final approach to runway 26 at 85 KIAS (knots indicated airspeed) with 2 notches of flap deployed. When the airplane was about a mile from the runway, the engine "barked." The pilot enrichened the mixture slightly and the engine ran smoothly. When the airplane was about 150 yards from the runway threshold, it "fell," or began to sink excessively in a nose high attitude. The pilot attributed this sudden descent to windshear. The airplane "landed hard and bounced." The pilot retracted the landing gear (because there was a ditch ahead and he thought it would be better to hit the ditch with the landing gear up) and added power to abort the landing. The airplane touched down again, swerved 90 degrees, and skidded to a halt on the dirt. Post-accident examination revealed no airplane or engine discrepancies. ASOS-observed weather, recorded 36 miles southeast of the accident site, indicated the wind was from 240 degrees at 11 knots, gusting to 15 knots.

Probable cause

the pilot's failure to maintain airspeed, resulting in an inadvertent stall and impact with terrain during a power-on landing. Contributing factors were the pilot's improper recovery from a bounced landing, and windshear.

Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset

Sources

NTSB record DEN06LA076
Event ID
20060518X00586
Case number
DEN06LA076
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. 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: 60c2a91a9196e7009981ce6c519d40b4242f21c6350bdd5bb67e310475943c07; retrieved 2026-09-22T04:55:47.131Z.