CEN18LA071 · Piper PA 12
Piper PA 12 · Accident: loss of control on ground during landing
From Texas Gulf Coast Regional Airport (LBX) to Texas Gulf Coast Regional Airport (LBX)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN18LA071
- 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 12
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-12
- 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
- N47FP
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Texas Gulf Coast Regional Airport (LBX), Angleton, TXTo Texas Gulf Coast Regional Airport (LBX), Angleton, TX
- Aircraft age
- About 70 years (built 1947)
- 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 · landing roll
- 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 control on ground
- 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 › Action/decision
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot was conducting a personal flight with a passenger. He indicated that after an uneventful flight, he performed a pattern approach to the runway for a touch-and-go landing. After touchdown, when the pilot lowered the left wheel to the ground, the airplane immediately and uncontrollably veered sharply to the left. The pilot applied full right rudder and immediately held the stick full right and aft to keep the airplane from ground looping or cartwheeling. The pilot was unable to regain directional control of the airplane, and it departed the runway to the left and collided with two precision approach path indicator lights before coming to a stop. Braking marks on the runway and grass correlated to the left main landing gear tire as it passed from the runway surface onto the grass. Postaccident examination did not reveal any anomalies with the left brake system. After the brake examination, the pilot stated that the passenger could have inadvertently had his foot on the brake pedal during the landing rollout. Because the examination did not reveal any anomalies with the brakes, it is likely that the passenger inadvertently activated the left brake pedal during the landing.
Probable cause
The passenger's inadvertent activation of the left brake during landing, which resulted in a loss of directional control and a runway excursion.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN18LA071
- Event ID
- 20180110X11342
- Case number
- CEN18LA071
- 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: 58bb69cfd3722e770e108338869ee2a7f93061f9e80334a8a4c516028d88f521; retrieved 2026-09-16T06:16:23.039Z.