CEN17LA341 · Piper PA-28 140
Piper PA-28 140 · Accident: hard landing
From Ray Community Airport (57D) to Ray Community Airport (57D)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN17LA341
- 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
- N5584U
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Ray Community Airport (57D), Ray, MITo Ray Community Airport (57D), Ray, MI
- Aircraft age
- About 48 years (built 1969)
- 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
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The private pilot (the owner of the airplane) was landing at the airport following a local flight. Witnesses reported that the airplane made several landing attempts, but, each time, the airplane was too fast or too high to land. On the last attempt, the airplane touched down hard and fast about halfway down the 2,495-ft-long runway. The airplane continued off the end of the runway, across a road, through a field, and struck several small trees and a tractor before coming to a stop. An examination of the airplane's systems revealed no pre-impact anomalies that contributed to the accident.
A flight instructor who had previously flown with the pilot told the pilot that he should fly only with an instructor on board, and that he was not ready to fly the airplane alone. Thus, it is likely that the pilot did not have the necessary experience to conduct a successful landing in the airplane.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain a proper approach speed, which resulted in in a hard landing and a runway excursion. Contributing to the accident was the pilot's decision to fly the airplane without an instructor onboard.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN17LA341
- Event ID
- 20170907X34535
- Case number
- CEN17LA341
- 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: e7bf5002e7532edf7729c92fd76c8319e12d1c0861ce6fe36f870bdc61a8d8e9; retrieved 2026-09-16T05:48:32.597Z.