DEN08LA079 · Piper PA-28-181
Piper PA-28-181 · Accident: loss of control in flight during initial climb
From Reserve Airport (T16) to Falcon Field (FFZ)
Event
- NTSB case
- DEN08LA079
- 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-28-181
- 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
- N6260J
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Reserve Airport (T16), Reserve, NMTo Falcon Field (FFZ), Mesa, AZ
- 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
- Initial climb
- 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
- Loss of control in flight
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Destroyed
Cause areas
- Aircraft › Aircraft oper/perf/capability
- 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
Takeoff was from runway 24. The wind was from 210 degrees at 10 to 12 knots. The pilot said that after the airplane lifted off and climbed above tree level, he encountered a "severe wind gust (right quartering tail wind) from approximately 040 degrees [of] at least 20+ knots." He said the airplane lost lift and was blown off runway centerline. He tried to "stabilize the [air]plane but with [the] loss of lift, [it] impacted [the] ground hard, [with the] nose and left wing, [and] flipped [over]." The airplane caught fire and was totally consumed. Airport elevation is 6,360 feet msl. Runway 06-24 is 4,800 feet long and 50 feet wide, and made of asphalt. Runway 24 has a 1.9 per cent uphill gradient. The pilot estimated his useful load to be 898 pounds and that the airplane weighed approximately 2,430 pounds. Gross weight is 2,550 pounds and empty weight is 1,540 pounds. According to the U.S. Forest Service ranger station, located approximately 5 miles east of the airport, the temperature was 53 degrees F. FAA calculated the density altitude to be between 6,900 and 7,300 feet. The pilot had been certificated for about six weeks, and had minimal high density altitude experience.
Probable cause
The pilot's loss of aircraft control, resulting in an inadvertent stall. Contributing factors in this accident were the sudden windshift to a gusting tailwind, an uphill runway, high density altitude, the pilot's failure to use all available runwayt, and his lack of experience in high altitude airport operations.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DEN08LA079
- Event ID
- 20080429X00562
- Case number
- DEN08LA079
- 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: b84f49c25420bc64cb9b1cc44d389b28f8cae0343f9ca289152680fd70808595; retrieved 2026-09-15T09:35:05.864Z.