CHI07CA003 · Piper PA-28-161
Piper PA-28-161 · Accident: hard landing
From SFD · Sioux Falls, SD to Hector International Airport (FAR)
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI07CA003
- 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-28-161
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-28
- 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
- N275ND
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From SFD · Sioux Falls, SDTo Hector International Airport (FAR), Fargo, ND
- 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
- 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 › Flare, inadequate
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 substantially damaged during a hard night landing. The private pilot was on a night cross country solo training flight when the accident occurred. She stated the landing was made on runway 18 with the winds reported as being from 150 degrees at 11 knots gusting to 19 knots. The pilot stated she encountered light turbulence on final approach and that the airspeed was 80 knots, which is higher than normal. The pilot stated that during the landing the nose gear and propeller struck the runway prior to the main gear due to the "...inadequate amount of flare... ." She stated the airplane then bounced twice prior to coming to a stop. The pilot reported having 87.5 hours of flight time of which 13 hours were as pilot-in-command.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadequate flare which resulted in a hard landing. Factors associated with the accident were the gusty winds and the pilot's lack of experience.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI07CA003
- Event ID
- 20061013X01520
- Case number
- CHI07CA003
- 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 2006-10-06.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 658365abc6c9bedb916853f42d5ec311f70d265dc08d7eec5348cc5d51cbff68; retrieved 2026-09-22T04:22:09.979Z.