WPR09CA271 · S.O.C.A.T.A. RALLYE 235
S.O.C.A.T.A. RALLYE 235 · Accident: hard landing
From Ontario Municipal Airport (ONO) to Ontario Municipal Airport (ONO)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR09CA271
- 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
S.O.C.A.T.A. RALLYE 235
- Aircraft type
- S RALLYE 235
- 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
- N315RA
- Operator
- Marlow and Lloyd Pounds
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Ontario Municipal Airport (ONO), Ontario, ORTo Ontario Municipal Airport (ONO), Ontario, OR
- 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
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot, who was conducting a series of touch-and-go landings, allowed the airplane to balloon during the landing flare. The airplane then dropped in from about five feet above the runway, resulting in a hard landing on all three landing gear. The pilot then added power, took off, and continued in the traffic pattern for another landing. During the subsequent landing roll, the nose landing gear collapsed, resulting in substantial damage to the firewall. The pilot, who had accumulated about 1,500 hours total flying time, had not flown this make and model airplane prior to this flight.
Probable cause
The pilot's misjudged landing flare. Contributing to the accident was the pilot's lack of any experience in the make and model airplane.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR09CA271
- Event ID
- 20090601X21627
- Case number
- WPR09CA271
- 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. 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: be916af0f52891a973667fae336c8709570fc7733d8724448b7539f1b3543393; retrieved 2026-09-15T11:14:52.400Z.