DEN06CA127 · Piper PA-46T-350P
Piper PA-46T-350P · Accident: loss of control in flight during landing
From Fort Scott Municipal Airport (FSK) to City of Colorado Springs Municipal Airport (COS)
Event
- NTSB case
- DEN06CA127
- 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-46T-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
- N71DH
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Fort Scott Municipal Airport (FSK), Fort Scott, KSTo City of Colorado Springs Municipal Airport (COS), Colo. Springs, 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
- 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 › Aircraft control, not maintained
- Pilot in command › Stall, inadvertent
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 had been cleared to land, and at that time the runway was vacant. While on short final, the control tower cleared a McDonnell Douglas MD-80 for takeoff. The pilot considered making a go-around, but decided against it because there were numerous airplanes following him. The pilot planned to touch down at a point prior to where the MD-80 rotated but encountered turbulence from the engines of the departing jet. The airplane pitched up and the airspeed disintegrated rapidly, causing it to land hard on its mains and bounce. The airplane bounced a second time and the pilot applied full power. The airplane impacted the runway a third time, causing the nose gear to collapse, and skidded to a stop on the runway. Further examination revealed the right wing upper skin was wrinkled.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain control of the airplane, resulting in an inadvertent stall. Contributing factors in this accident were the jet blast encounter, and the pilot's failure to initiate a go-around when he felt an unsafe condition existed.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DEN06CA127
- Event ID
- 20061005X01460
- Case number
- DEN06CA127
- 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: 7ff1771d5905f2fa18b5f40dca2c732be801376b365aa7c15aeaa173a173b932; retrieved 2026-09-22T04:26:35.606Z.