ERA10CA441 · Piper PA-28-181
Piper PA-28-181 · Accident: hard landing
From CBE · Cumberland, MD to Garrett County Airport (2G4)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA10CA441
- 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-28-181
- 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
- N348TF
- Operator
- Wasser Nathan H
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From CBE · Cumberland, MDTo Garrett County Airport (2G4), Oakland, MD
- 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 › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
According to the pilot, he was established on final approach, with wind reported from 310 degrees at 5 knots. He reduced the power to maintain a 500 foot-per-minute (fpm) descent rate. As the airplane slowed to 110 knots, the pilot lowered one notch of flaps. He realized that he was high on the approach, so he lowered the nose and increased the descent rate to 700 fpm. He then lowered two more notches of flaps, and the airplane continued to slow down. Over the runway threshold, the pilot began to flare and heard the stall warning horn. He misjudged his height above the runway and did not add power in the flare as the stall warning continued. He flared about 15 feet above the runway, the airplane landed hard, and the initial touchdown forced the main gears up through the wings. The airplane then bounced twice and skidded off the left side of the runway and down an embankment; the left wing and the landing gear separated during the event. The pilot reported that there were no preexisting mechanical anomalies with the airplane.
Probable cause
The pilot’s improper landing flare, which resulted in a hard landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA10CA441
- Event ID
- 20100825X22300
- Case number
- ERA10CA441
- 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: 355446dbf01fc759844ea3afa95abca23bf88c25362c44a89917918b79e241b6; retrieved 2026-09-15T14:57:21.667Z.