WPR10CA086 · Piper PA-28R-200
Tiffin Aviation Service Piper PA-28R-200 · Accident: hard landing
From Nogales International Airport (OLS) to Nogales International Airport (OLS)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR10CA086
- 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-28R-200
- 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
- N2085T
- Operator
- Tiffin Aviation Service
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Nogales International Airport (OLS), Nogales, AZTo Nogales International Airport (OLS), Nogales, AZ
- 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 › Action/decision
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, not marked as estimated; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight instructor said that he was giving an end-of-course stage check to the private licensed student, who was taking a commercial pilot course. The instructor said that the flight was normal and upon returning to the airport he requested to see a short-field landing. They landed in a nose-high attitude and there was "only a slight bump” when the aircraft’s main wheels touched down. Two more landings were performed by the student, which completed the stage check. Four hours later the flight instructor took the same student out for another lesson. The airplane had not been flown during this 4-hour period. During the airplane’s preflight examination, he found a large crack in the left wing's surface immediately above the landing gear attachment point. The flight instructor stated that the student did not make any hard landings during the first flight of the day. The student stated that she did not remember anything unusual about the flight.
Probable cause
The student's improper landing flare and the flight instructor's inadequate remedial action.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR10CA086
- Event ID
- 20091217X52949
- Case number
- WPR10CA086
- 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: 70a6a4d1ee8c9fdbc833c1dfd5c104c29f52c859b07bd37a25f28fda518a54cf; retrieved 2026-09-15T13:34:43.534Z.