WPR13FA430 · Cessna 525A CITATION
Cessna 525A CITATION · Accident: loss of control on ground during landing
From Friedman Memorial Airport (KSUN) to Santa Monica Municipal Airport (KSMO)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR13FA430
- 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
- 4 · 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
Cessna 525A CITATION
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 525
- 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
- N194SJ
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Friedman Memorial Airport (KSUN), Hailey, IDTo Santa Monica Municipal Airport (KSMO), Santa Monica, CA
- Aircraft age
- About 10 years (built 2003)
- 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
- Destroyed
Cause areas
- Aircraft › Aircraft oper/perf/capability
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The private pilot was returning to his home airport; the approach was normal, and the airplane landed within the runway touchdown zone markings and on the runway centerline. About midfield, the airplane started to drift to the right side of the runway, and during the landing roll, the nose pitched up suddenly and dropped back down. The airplane veered off the runway and impacted the 1,000-ft runway distance remaining sign and continued to travel in a right-hand turn until it impacted a hangar. The airplane came to rest inside the hangar, and the damage to the structure caused the roof to collapse onto the airplane. A postaccident fire quickly ensued. The subsequent wreckage examination did not reveal any mechanical anomalies with the airplane's engines, flight controls, steering, or braking system.
A video study was conducted using security surveillance video from a fixed-base operator located midfield, and the study established that the airplane was not decelerating as it passed through midfield. Deceleration was detected after the airplane had veered off the runway and onto the parking apron in front of the rows of hangars it eventually impacted. Additionally, video images could not definitively establish that the flaps were deployed during the landing roll. However, the flaps were deployed as the airplane veered off the runway and into the hangar, but it could not be determined to what degree. To obtain maximum braking performance, the flaps should be placed in the "ground flap" position immediately after touchdown. The wreckage examination determined that the flaps were in the "ground flap" position at the time the airplane impacted the hangar.
Numerous personal electronic devices that had been onboard the airplane provided images of the passengers and unrestrained pets, including a large dog, with access to the cockpit during the accident flight. Although the unrestrained animals had the potential to create a distraction during the landing roll, there was insufficient information to determine their role in the accident sequence or what caused the delay in the pilot's application of the brakes.
Probable cause
The pilot’s failure to adequately decrease the airplane’s ground speed or maintain directional control during the landing roll, which resulted in a runway excursion and collision with an airport sign and structure and a subsequent postcrash fire.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR13FA430
- Event ID
- 20130930X32148
- Case number
- WPR13FA430
- 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 2013-09-30.
- API snapshot SHA-256: b75c5da82b0a78db50e8174aec925b040740399f288005c786e68f16a5e0abf4; retrieved 2026-09-14T16:04:47.965Z.