CEN09CA453 · Piper PA28 140
Piper PA28 140 · Accident: landing area undershoot
From Malvern Municipal Airport (M78) to Malvern Municipal Airport (M78)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN09CA453
- 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 PA28 140
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA28
- 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
- N33365
- Operator
- Carl E. Cook · private individual
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Malvern Municipal Airport (M78), Malvern, ARTo Malvern Municipal Airport (M78), Malvern, AR
- 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
- Landing area undershoot
- 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 stated that the approach to landing was routine, flown with two notches of flaps, and airspeed steady at 80 knots. The pilot said the airplane appeared to be landing long, so he selected the last notch of flaps. Immediately afterward, he observed that the airspeed had decayed to 60 knots and the airplane had developed a high sink rate. The pilot applied full power but was unable to arrest the descent. The airplane impacted terrain approximately ten feet short of the runway threshold sustaining in substantial damage. An examination showed the left wing was fractured and mostly separated from the airframe just outboard of the fuselage. The left main landing gear and nose gear had collapsed and the propeller was bent. The pilot stated that the weather was clear, there was no wind, and there were no mechanical anomalies with the airplane prior to the accident. An examination of the airplane by a Federal Aviation Airworthiness Inspector confirmed no mechanical anomalies.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain adequate airspeed during the approach to landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN09CA453
- Event ID
- 20090722X22023
- Case number
- CEN09CA453
- 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: local date, investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2009-07-18.
- API snapshot SHA-256: d40a50f5a3f269265156aefb00fe5947140521a785ecc1b56b50cf45b8dc7484; retrieved 2026-09-15T11:57:56.481Z.