ERA16WA002 · Piper PA-31-325
El Caminante Air Piper PA-31-325 · Accident during takeoff
From Guaymaral Airport (SKGY) to Enrique Olaya Herrera Airport (SKMD)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA16WA002
- 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
- Unknown · led by another country; figures from NTSB notifications
- API-reported fatalities
- 2 · 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-31-325
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-31
- 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
- HK3909G
- Operator
- El Caminante Air
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Guaymaral Airport (SKGY), GuaymaralTo Enrique Olaya Herrera Airport (SKMD), Medellin
- Aircraft age
- Not recorded
- 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
- Non-U.S., Non-Commercial
- 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
- Unknown or undetermined
- 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
No findings designated as a cause are recorded in the NTSB data yet.
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
On October 3, 2015, about 1715 UTC, a Piper PA-31-325, Colombian registration HK3909G, registered to and operated by El Caminante Air S.A., collided with a structure then rolled inverted during a forced landing in a field near Hipodromo de los Andes, Chia, Cundinamarca, Colombia. Visual meteorological conditions prevailed at the time and a VFR flight plan was filed for the non-U.S., non-commercial flight from Guaymaral Airport (SKGY), Bogota, Colombia, to Olaya Herrera Airport (SKMD), Medellin, Colombia. The airplane was destroyed by impact and a postcrash fire. The commercial pilot and one passenger were fatally injured, and one passenger sustained minor injuries. The flight originated about 2 minutes earlier from SKGY.
According to the Colombia investigator-in-charge, about 2 minutes after takeoff, the pilot declared an emergency and advised the controller that he intended to perform an emergency landing to a field that was in sight. During approach to the field, the airplane collided with structure, rolled inverted, and collided with terrain. A postcrash fire occurred.
This investigation is under the jurisdiction of the Government of Colombia. Any further information can be obtained from:
Unidad Administrativa Especial de Aeronautica Civil Aeropuerto Internacional El Dorado Bogota, Colombia Telephone: 571.425.1000
This report is for informational purposes only, and contains information released by or obtained for the Government of Colombia.
Verbatim NTSB factual narrative from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA16WA002
- Event ID
- 20151005X12529
- Case number
- ERA16WA002
- 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.
- No bulk values were replaced by the NTSB case API.
- The date is the local date, which is the same as the UTC date the NTSB stores.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 9762438c8aea63ee2c29b3a9e31b2e215382d654d7c6a20993bea0cbb7a1f1c3; retrieved 2026-09-14T21:32:02.863Z.