CEN15CA223 · Piper J3C-65
Piper J3C-65 · Accident: ground collision while taxiing
From Monroe Municipal Airport (KEFT) to DeKalb Taylor Municipal Airport (KDKB)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN15CA223
- 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 J3C-65
- Aircraft type
- Piper J3
- 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
- N98656
- Operator
- Joseph A. Begany · private individual
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Monroe Municipal Airport (KEFT), Monroe, WITo DeKalb Taylor Municipal Airport (KDKB), De Kalb, IL
- Aircraft age
- About 69 years (built 1946)
- 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
- Taxi
- 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
- Ground collision
- 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 › Physical
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot, who was in the rear tandem seat of the tailwheel airplane, had just landed and was taxing to the fuel pumps to refuel. He did not see the parked Beech A36 over the nose of his airplane and collided with the right wing of N4678A. The pilot said the accident could have been prevented if he had followed the taxi line on the tarmac. He also blamed his "less than effective brakes" that didn't help as he tried to control the airplane in the wind. This caused his attention to be diverted and he lost sight of the surrounding obstructions. The pilot had logged a total of 82 flight hours, of which 13 hours were in the accident airplane.
Probable cause
The pilot's loss of positional awareness while taxiing, resulting in a collision with a parked and unoccupied airplane. Contributing to the accident was the pilot's difficulty seeing over the nose of the airplane, his preoccupation with trying to control the airplane in the wind, and his minimal experience in the airplane.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN15CA223
- Event ID
- 20150506X44421
- Case number
- CEN15CA223
- 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: 89642dde8057e54db518a4326a11c63ddfda9c4d0c2c5573f0409e58c79a2700; retrieved 2026-09-16T02:17:36.943Z.