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WPR18LA173 · Piper PA 28-140

16 Jun 2018 · Hartford, CT, United States

Piper PA 28-140 · Accident: landing area overshoot

From Hartford Brainard Airport (KHFD) to New Bedford Regional Airport (KEWB)

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Event

NTSB case
WPR18LA173
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
N1782J
Operator
Unknown
Onboard fatalities
Unknown
Route
From Hartford Brainard Airport (KHFD), Hartford, CTTo New Bedford Regional Airport (KEWB), New Bedford, MA
Aircraft age
About 50 years (built 1968)
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
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
Landing area overshoot
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

  • Not determined › Not determined

Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.

NTSB narrative

The pilot stated that after takeoff, the engine lost partial power, and the airplane would not maintain altitude. The pilot initiated a forced landing to a runway at a nearby closed airport. During the descent, the pilot verified the mixture was full rich and the carburetor heat was off, and he switched fuel tanks. The pilot said the engine did not respond, so he turned it off and executed a "forward slip" and S-turns to position the airplane onto the runway; however, the airplane landed about 600 ft from the departure end of the runway, overran the end of the runway, and struck a fence which resulted in substantial damage to the wings and fuselage. The pilot reported he believed that the recently replaced fuel selector valve failed and starved the engine of fuel. Postaccident examination of the airplane and an engine test run did not reveal any anomalies with the engine, fuel system or the fuel selector valve that would have precluded normal operation. Thus, the reason for the loss of engine power could not be determined.

Probable cause

A loss of engine power for undetermined reasons because postaccident examination of the engine and fuel system did not reveal any anomalies that would have precluded normal operation, which led to the pilot’s forced landing and subsequent runway overshoot and collision with a fence.

Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset

Sources

NTSB record WPR18LA173
Event ID
20180618X72911
Case number
WPR18LA173
Dataset
full-current
Source SHA-256
5cf380f0061817c0331a6b2d8cc7e0ee3a79bea469a1001dc5c10e56f35f5ab3
Source notes (5)
  • 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: ccc83f0f2ba8cafe4ce7097af2e49c03aa0e1680dbd7a408439050065619346f; retrieved 2026-09-16T07:33:56.063Z.
  • Corrected after a review of the NTSB narrative, which states these values explicitly: destination. KEWB is New Bedford Regional Airport in New Bedford, Massachusetts; there is no New Bedford, Connecticut, so the state code CT is wrong.