ERA09LA358 · Piper PA-28-161
Alpha One Flight School Piper PA-28-161 · Accident: collision with terrain/object (non-CFIT) during takeoff
From Plymouth Municipal Airport (PYM) to Plymouth Municipal Airport (PYM)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA09LA358
- 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-28-161
- 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
- N29496
- Operator
- Alpha One Flight School
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Plymouth Municipal Airport (PYM), Plymouth, MATo Plymouth Municipal Airport (PYM), Plymouth, MA
- 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
- Takeoff · rejected takeoff
- 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
- Collision with terrain/object (non-CFIT)
- 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
After performing several takeoffs and landings on runway 24, the certified flight instructor (CFI) elected to use the grass area parallel to runway 33 in order to demonstrate soft-field takeoffs to the student pilot. Once airborne the CFI lowered the nose of the airplane in order to accelerate to their predetermined climbout speed of 79 knots indicated airspeed (KIAS). According to the CFI, the airplane accelerated fairly normally to 55 KIAS, then slowly accelerated to 60 KIAS, at which point the airspeed "stagnated." The CFI made the decision to discontinue the takeoff and land on the remaining portion of the grass area. She allowed the airplane to "float over" the paved portion of a perpendicular runway and touched down on the main landing gear on the other side of the paved portion. The airplane made contact with a low berm and the nosegear collapsed. The grass area that was used for this flight was not a runway and was approximately 1,000 feet in length. The pilot operating handbook for this airplane make and model does not prohibit the departure from a non-paved surface area; however, the only performance data that was provided by the manufacturer requires a "paved, level, dry runway."
Probable cause
The CFI's inadequate preflight planning and delay to abort the takeoff from the soft takeoff area.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA09LA358
- Event ID
- 20090620X80417
- Case number
- ERA09LA358
- 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: 4b8523339c65f5394182016a769761e2297afc13416ab5b44a489f0f3cf72bb0; retrieved 2026-09-15T11:30:15.948Z.