NYC07CA108 · Piper PA28R-201
Delta Connection Academy Piper PA28R-201 · Accident: hard landing
From Orlando Sanford International Airport (SFB) to Leesburg International Airport (LEE)
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC07CA108
- 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 PA28R-201
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA28
- 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
- N809MS
- Operator
- Delta Connection Academy
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Orlando Sanford International Airport (SFB), Sanford, FLTo Leesburg International Airport (LEE)
- 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
- Dual student › Airspeed, not maintained
- Pilot in command(cfi) › Remedial action, not performed
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The certified flight instructor (CFI) was providing flight instruction to the private pilot, who was training for a commercial pilot certificate. The airplane was in the traffic pattern, abeam the runway, when the flight instructor reduced the engine power, and asked the private pilot to demonstrate a power off, 180-degree accuracy landing. The CFI verbally coached the private pilot throughout the approach, and reminded him to watch the airspeed, which was 3 knots slow. The CFI reported that when the airplane was about 100 feet above the ground, the private pilot increased the flaps from 10 to 25 degrees, and pitched the nose up. The airspeed degraded, and the airplane subsequently landed hard, and sustained wing spar damage. The flight instructor had accumulated about 800 hours of total flight experience. The private pilot had accumulated about 190 hours of total flight experience.
Probable cause
The flight instructor's failure to take remedial action, and the private pilot's failure to maintain proper airspeed, which resulted in a hard landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC07CA108
- Event ID
- 20070616X00744
- Case number
- NYC07CA108
- 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: 9e341d7179681a65a4a9adfc6206037d9f3d4a19f3d3d069f8fb8715e0166abb; retrieved 2026-09-22T03:51:28.029Z.