CEN14CA488 · Piper PA 28-140
Piper PA 28-140 · Accident: abrupt maneuver during landing
From E80 · Belen, NM to E80 · Belen, NM
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN14CA488
- 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 28-140
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-28
- 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
- N6693W
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From E80 · Belen, NMTo E80 · Belen, NM
- Aircraft age
- About 49 years (built 1965)
- 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 · aborted after 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
- Abrupt maneuver
- 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 › Action/decision
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
On the student pilot's second solo landing the airplane landed hard and bounced twice. The flight instructor, standing on the side of the runway, radioed instructions to "go-around". The student pilot then applied full power, applied right rudder and retracted one notch of flaps. The flight instructor observed the airplane was then in a steep nose up stalling pitch attitude. He radioed instructions to "pitch down, pitch down", and with the airplane very low to the ground and drifting left, the student pilot radioed back asking the flight instructor to "say again". Control was lost and the airplane impacted a hangar about 650 feet to the left of runway center line. The impact resulted in substantial damage to the fuselage, empennage, tail surfaces, and both wings which were completely separated as the airplane penetrated the hangar wall. The fuselage came to rest inside the closed hangar and there was no postimpact fire. The student pilot reported that had attempted the go-around with too much pitch, too little speed, and not enough rudder input. He also reported that the accident would not have happened if he had spent more of his attention "flying the plane" and less attention communicating on the radio during a critical phase of flight. Additionally, the student pilot reported there were no preaccident mechanical malfunctions or failures with the airplane that would have precluded normal operation.
Probable cause
The student pilot's improper recovery from a bounced landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN14CA488
- Event ID
- 20140908X52707
- Case number
- CEN14CA488
- 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: ec42e4af326f589c9499eca89e5f7c751e78701f8780d5c406b02e2bf2a2d3be; retrieved 2026-09-16T01:43:59.486Z.