ERA09CA553 · Champion 7GCAA
Champion 7GCAA · Accident: loss of control in flight during landing
From Turners Falls Airport (0B5) to Ware Airport (MA53)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA09CA553
- 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
Champion 7GCAA
- Aircraft type
- Champion 7
- 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
- N1879G
- Operator
- Richard C. O'Riley · private individual
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Turners Falls Airport (0B5), Montague, MATo Ware Airport (MA53), Ware, 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
- 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
- Loss of control in flight
- 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
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot stated that an annual inspection of the airplane had just been completed and that he was flying the airplane from that location to his home airstrip. The wind was on the nose of the airplane and as he approached the runway for a full stop landing, his approach speed was 55 mph. When the airplane was approximately 1 foot above the runway for a three point landing, the airspeed decreased and the nose dropped. The propeller contacted the soft ground and the airplane nosed over, damaging the vertical stabilizer and right wing lift struts. The pilot reported that there was nothing mechanically wrong with the airplane that caused the accident to occur.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain control of the airplane during landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA09CA553
- Event ID
- 20100611X12721
- Case number
- ERA09CA553
- 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: ca5e44a2e859a8a55a684b2f6750da22bcf353d8293bb9bc8c6575abb7b08a3c; retrieved 2026-09-15T14:26:16.406Z.