WPR12CA342 · Piper PA18 A150
Piper PA18 A150 · Accident: low altitude operation/event en route
From Ethnos Air Airport (2AZ9) to Ethnos Air Airport (2AZ9)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR12CA342
- 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 PA18 A150
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA18
- 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
- N2364P
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Ethnos Air Airport (2AZ9), McNeal, AZTo Ethnos Air Airport (2AZ9), McNeal, 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
- En route · cruise
- 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
- Low altitude operation/event
- 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
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot was taking a passenger on a tour of the local area. The pilot had previously conducted such flights, and he had a normal route that he followed. However, on this occasion, he deviated from that route to "do something a little different" and turned up a canyon that he normally did not fly into. He noticed that the terrain was rising and attempted to climb to clear it. Shortly thereafter, he noticed that the airplane was not going to clear the terrain. He realized that there was insufficient room to execute a course reversal to exit the area and decided to land straight ahead on the rising, vegetation-covered, desert terrain. Immediately after touchdown, the airplane rotated sharply to the right and stopped. The outboard section of the right wing was bent and crumpled. The pilot stated that there were no mechanical problems or failures of the airplane or engine before the accident. The automated weather observation at an airport located 8 miles south of the accident site, at an elevation of 4,150 feet above mean sea level (msl), reported winds from 280 degrees at 3 knots, clear skies, and a temperature of 26 degrees C. The accident site elevation was about 5,400 feet msl, and the estimated density altitude was about 7,600 feet.
Probable cause
The pilot's in-flight decision to fly at low level into an unfamiliar canyon, which resulted in an off-airport landing when the airplane's climb capability was exceeded. Contributing to the accident was the airplane’s decreased performance due to the high density altitude.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR12CA342
- Event ID
- 20120802X92351
- Case number
- WPR12CA342
- 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: 3060130af02a6d773e69705b6459ba68c7b2a5182c06887f2c267384707fea89; retrieved 2026-09-15T19:13:51.411Z.