ERA09LA384 · Lancair Company LC42-550FG
Lancair Company LC42-550FG · Accident: birdstrike during landing
From Lancaster Airport (LNS) to Ocean City Municipal Airport (26N)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA09LA384
- 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
- 0
- 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
Lancair Company LC42-550FG
- Aircraft type
- Lancair LC42
- 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
- N6502A
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Lancaster Airport (LNS), Lancaster, PATo Ocean City Municipal Airport (26N), Ocean City, 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 · 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
- Birdstrike
- 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
- Environmental issues › Physical environment
- Organizational issues › Management
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
While landing at his destination airport, the pilot observed two Canada geese emerge from the grass beside the runway. The airplane struck the geese with the propeller and right main landing gear, then veered off the runway and struck a concrete runway light mounting pad. Postaccident examination revealed damage to the propeller, engine cowling, and composite structure of the airframe, as well as damage to the nosewheel and main landing gear. The airport experienced 55 aircraft operations a day with 60 percent of the operations involving transient aircraft. The airport was also located next to a marsh, and the airport, marsh, and an adjacent golf course had approximately 30 Canada geese permanently inhabiting the area. No warning regarding birds being on or in the vicinity of the airport was published in the airport facility directory, nor was a warning recorded on the airport's automated weather advisory system. No fencing was present to keep geese from walking onto the airport from the marsh, and the airport did not have a formal wildlife mitigation program.
Probable cause
An in-flight collision with birds during landing. Contributing to the accident was the airport's lack of a wildlife mitigation program.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA09LA384
- Event ID
- 20090707X32434
- Case number
- ERA09LA384
- 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: 36897e7f7529bc48d4fc6c45b044f552e86b70075c352efd902b75b7d4edad1c; retrieved 2026-09-15T11:43:23.382Z.