DEN08LA065 · Plocher SHA-Glasair
Plocher SHA-Glasair · Accident: hard landing
From Boise Air Terminal/Gowen Field (BOI) to Telluride Regional Airport (TEX)
Event
- NTSB case
- DEN08LA065
- 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
Plocher SHA-Glasair
- Aircraft type
- Plocher SHA-GLASAIR
- 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
- N315LP
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Boise Air Terminal/Gowen Field (BOI), Boise, IDTo Telluride Regional Airport (TEX), Telluride, 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
- Defining eventThe 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
- Aircraft › Aircraft oper/perf/capability
- Aircraft › Aircraft structures
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
Unicom advised the pilot that the winds were from 260 degrees at 6 knots. He decided to land on runway 09 as per the airport's request to avoid flying over populated areas. He postponed dropping his flaps until he "had the runway made." This resulted in a 90 knot airspeed, "which is a little high," and he crossed the runway threshold at 50 feet agl (above ground level). Full flaps were deployed and he reduced airspeed as he approached the runway. He noticed his groundspeed "was quite a bit higher than what [he] was accustomed to." The first touchdown was 800 feet past the runway threshold and as he pulled back to flare, the airplane ballooned up 20 feet. The pilot flared again but the airplane dropped and bounced on the main gear, then the nose gear, which then collapsed. The propeller struck the runway and the airplane skidded to a halt.
Probable cause
The pilot's improper flare and his failure to maintain aircraft control, resulting in the design stress limits of the nose gear being exceeded. Contributing factors in this accident was the excessive airspeed, the pilot-induced porpoise of the airplane, and the tailwind.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DEN08LA065
- Event ID
- 20080319X00334
- Case number
- DEN08LA065
- Dataset
- full-current
- Source SHA-256
- 5cf380f0061817c0331a6b2d8cc7e0ee3a79bea469a1001dc5c10e56f35f5ab3
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: 734e8a7cddfe8356019dee6ffa829f05b80670b3d9444f63e9b6816243770c01; retrieved 2026-09-15T09:26:29.389Z.