CHI07CA008 · Piper PA-24-260
Piper PA-24-260 · Accident: hard landing
From Philip Billard Municipal Airport (TOP) to Grand Glaize Osage Beach Airport (K15)
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI07CA008
- 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-24-260
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-24
- 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
- N8546P
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Philip Billard Municipal Airport (TOP), Topeka, KSTo Grand Glaize Osage Beach Airport (K15), Osage Beach, MO
- 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
- 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 › Compensation for wind conditions, 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 landing. The pilot reported experiencing light to moderate turbulence during his descent to the destination airport. He reported that, "immediately prior to touchdown there was a gust of wind jerking us in our seats. There was an immediate loss of airspeed and lift." The pilot reported that he applied full engine power, but the airplane impacted the runway hard resulting in the damage to the aircraft. The pilot reported that the winds at the accident airport were from 270 degrees at 10 knots gusting to 30 knots. The nearest weather reporting station located about 7 nautical miles east of the accident airport recorded the wind from 270 degrees at 9 knots gusting to 14 knots. The weather report indicated that the wind direction was variable from 250 to 310 degrees. Runway 32 was used for the landing.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadequate compensation for wind conditions which resulted in the hard landing. The gusting crosswind was a factor.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI07CA008
- Event ID
- 20061106X01616
- Case number
- CHI07CA008
- 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: 3bb8c34267babdd089c11b7d62832ffc76ba34656a1563f492175c32c73ced05; retrieved 2026-09-22T04:19:42.525Z.