ERA12LA505 · Piper PA-22-160
Piper PA-22-160 · Accident: flight control system malfunction/failure during landing
From Foley Municipal Airport (5R4) to Bay Minette Municipal Airport (1R8)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA12LA505
- 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-22-160
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-22
- 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
- N9216D
- Operator
- Jose Martinez
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Foley Municipal Airport (5R4), Foley, ALTo Bay Minette Municipal Airport (1R8), Bay Minette, AL
- 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
- Flight control system malfunction/failure
- 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 systems
- Not determined › Not determined
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The student pilot performed seven uneventful full-stop landings; however, during the takeoff that preceded the accident, he felt something abnormal from the tailwheel. During the subsequent landing, the airplane began to drift to the left and could not be controlled with the appropriate brake and rudder inputs. The airplane departed the left side of the runway, and the empennage was substantially damaged when it struck a precision approach path indicator light. Postaccident examination of the airplane revealed that the linkage that attached the tailwheel to the rudder was not attached. The airplane had been operated for about 3 hours since its most recent annual inspection, which was performed about 3 weeks before the accident. In addition, the airplane was converted from a tricycle to tailwheel configuration and had undergone a complete restoration during the previous 2 years. The tailwheel linkage was not located, and its preaccident condition could not be determined.
Probable cause
The separation of the tailwheel linkage for reasons that could not be determined because the linkage was not located, which resulted in a loss of directional control during landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA12LA505
- Event ID
- 20120814X23425
- Case number
- ERA12LA505
- 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: local date, investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2012-08-13.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 41aa62802dd93d1cd4051fb2d416c344f5f56d2ad35ff3c88cc6390fa8ab7eba; retrieved 2026-09-15T19:20:15.718Z.