ERA09CA190 · Piper PA-42
Hortmont Aviation Services Piper PA-42 · Accident: abnormal runway contact during landing
From Northeast Philadelphia Airport (PNE) to Monmouth Executive Airport (BLM)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA09CA190
- 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
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
Piper PA-42
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-42
- 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
- N28DA
- Operator
- Hortmont Aviation Services
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Northeast Philadelphia Airport (PNE), Philadelphia, PATo Monmouth Executive Airport (BLM), Belmar, NJ
- 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
- 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
- Abnormal runway contact
- 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
- 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
The pilot in the right seat stated that he was the "flying pilot" at the time of the accident. The flight proceeded normally in instrument meteorological conditions. The pilot made visual contact with the airport between 1 and 2 miles from the airport, and the pilot circled to land on runway 14. When he was between 200 and 300 hundred feet above ground level, he corrected his turn to final with a "slightly aggressive bank angle" while simultaneously reducing power, resulting in an excessive sink rate. He rolled the wings to level and increased power. He was not able to arrest the sink rate before the aircraft impacted the runway. The impact collapsed the left main landing gear and caused the airplane to swerve left. The airplane came to rest approximately 1000 feet beyond the threshold off the left side of the runway. The "flying pilot" had over 133 hours in the make and model of the accident aircraft, 20 hours as pilot in command (PIC), and 3 hours as PIC in the preceding 90 days.
Probable cause
The pilot's improper flare, which resulted in a hard landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA09CA190
- Event ID
- 20090309X54240
- Case number
- ERA09CA190
- 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: 2d3dbe4ff086bca1320483dbb03d114a89eed72f86367aba3972601946de60f2; retrieved 2026-09-15T10:49:09.947Z.