CEN15LA301 · Piper PA 28-140
Piper PA 28-140 · Accident: loss of lift during takeoff
From 6LA4 · Oakdale, LA to Livingston Municipal Airport (00R)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN15LA301
- 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
- N3949K
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From 6LA4 · Oakdale, LATo Livingston Municipal Airport (00R), Livingston, TX
- Aircraft age
- About 48 years (built 1967)
- 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
- Takeoff
- 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 lift
- 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 › 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 checked the windsock at his private airfield before takeoff and that it was hanging down, not moving. As he became airborne during takeoff, he experienced a 10 to 15 knot tail wind and began to lose altitude. He advanced the throttle to full power to gain altitude. The engine responded but the airplane continued to settle. The trees off the departure end of the runway were located about 1,655 ft away. Given the effects of density altitude, clearing the 40-ft trees would have required about 1,640 ft on a prepared surface; however, taking off on an unprepared surface and with the lack of lift due to the tailwind, the airplane hit trees and came to rest inverted on the ground. Had the pilot done proper preflight planning he would have realized he did not have adequate airplane performance to clear the trees.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadequate preflight planning resulting in the airplane not having adequate performance to climb and clear the trees off the end of the dirt runway.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN15LA301
- Event ID
- 20150709X65917
- Case number
- CEN15LA301
- 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: 288c7e9c80c71f6da1e9a9ae0500a4970f22e4f4d0bcccdca5092497ec778e29; retrieved 2026-09-16T02:30:55.079Z.