ERA14LA103 · Piper PA-12
Piper PA-12 · Accident: hard landing
From Tampa North Aero Park Airport (X39) to Zephyrhills Municipal Airport (ZPH)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA14LA103
- 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-12
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-12
- 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
- N3668N
- Operator
- Connors Sean P
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Tampa North Aero Park Airport (X39), Tampa, FLTo Zephyrhills Municipal Airport (ZPH), Zephyrhills, FL
- Aircraft age
- About 67 years (built 1947)
- 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 from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot reported that he was landing on runway 4 with surface wind from 275 degrees at 15 knots gusting to 25 knots. The approach was normal, but the airplane touched down long. A gust of wind lifted the left wing high while the pilot input full left aileron controls. He added power while attempting to recover, but the left wing descended, and the left main landing gear subsequently collapsed when the airplane landed hard, which resulted in structural damage to the lower fuselage. The airplane ground looped around the failed gear and came to a stop. The pilot reported that the main gear safety cable, which was designed to prevent airframe damage in the event of a failed main gear bungee, had malfunctioned. A postaccident examination of the braided steel cable revealed that it failed in tension overload, and no evidence of a preimpact anomaly was found. The cable attachment points were secure. The main landing gear bungees were severed. Although the position of the cable before the hard landing could not be determined due to airplane and landing gear damage, the safety cable likely severed the main landing gear bungees during the accident sequence.
Probable cause
The pilot’s inadequate compensation for gusting wind conditions, which resulted in a hard landing that produced forces beyond the structural capability of the airframe.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA14LA103
- Event ID
- 20140124X03838
- Case number
- ERA14LA103
- 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, coordinates. 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: 931268132c27d66dd8f39df0c9bc3e229b8e21495ab59f3a185ce2929f55dc6c; retrieved 2026-09-15T23:16:28.852Z.