ERA12CA266 · Piper PA-60-602P
Piper PA-60-602P · Accident: loss of control on ground during landing
From William T. Piper Memorial Airport (LHV) to Philadelphia International Airport (PHL)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA12CA266
- 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-60-602P
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-60
- 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
- N6902L
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From William T. Piper Memorial Airport (LHV), Lock Haven, PATo Philadelphia International Airport (PHL), Philadelphia, PA
- 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 · landing roll
- 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 on ground
- 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
- Environmental issues › Conditions/weather/phenomena
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot was cleared to land on runway 26. The recorded surface wind at the airport around the time of the accident was from 330 to 340 degrees at 14 to 18 knots, gusting to 25 knots; a peak wind gust from 350 degrees at 26 knots was recorded about 7 minutes after the accident. The pilot said that he landed on the left main gear with the right main intermittently touching the ground and tried to lower the right wing to improve wheel-to-runway contact but was unsuccessful because of a wind gust. The airplane swerved off the left side of the runway onto the soft grass area, where the airplane’s main landing gear collapsed, and both wings were substantially damaged. The pilot reported no preaccident mechanical malfunctions or failures that would have precluded normal operations.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain directional control while landing in gusting crosswind conditions.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA12CA266
- Event ID
- 20120403X03055
- Case number
- ERA12CA266
- 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: 09608c0db46b196cce29b18410f88bc4a37055ec68c71777dfa5c3661f82db80; retrieved 2026-09-15T17:39:06.401Z.