CHI06CA179 · Aviat A-1
Aviat A-1 · Accident: nose over during landing
From Dowagiac Municipal Airport (C91) to Watervliet, MI
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI06CA179
- 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
Aviat A-1
- Aircraft type
- Aviat A-1
- 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
- N70HU
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Dowagiac Municipal Airport (C91), Dowagiac, MITo Watervliet, MI
- 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
- Nose over
- 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
- Object › Animal(s)
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 damaged when it nosed over during landing on a private grass airstrip. In a telephone conversation, the pilot said that he was landing at the private strip to give a ride to a person. He stated that he performed a flyby of the airstrip to check the condition of the strip and then entered a normal traffic pattern. He stated that he touched down "very early on the runway" and while rolling out, a deer came onto the runway from an adjacent field. He stated that he applied the brakes when he saw the deer and the airplane flipped over onto its back. He stated that there were no problems with the airplane. He estimated that the runway was 800 feet long and 75 feet wide.
Probable cause
The presence of the deer on the runway which resulted in the pilot taking evasive action leading to the nose-over. A factor was the excessive braking by the pilot.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI06CA179
- Event ID
- 20060809X01130
- Case number
- CHI06CA179
- 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: a5efd9d813e162bd395455df643c095e5b113073d0f3f0ec91cf8b1572b48e46; retrieved 2026-09-22T04:42:03.156Z.