WPR18LA203 · Piper PA32 300
Piper PA32 300 · Accident: runway excursion during landing
From Fullerton Municipal Airport (FUL) to Catalina Airport (AVX)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR18LA203
- 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 PA32 300
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA32
- 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
- N4747H
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Fullerton Municipal Airport (FUL), Fullerton, CATo Catalina Airport (AVX), Avalon, CA
- 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
- 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 · aborted after 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
- Runway excursion
- 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
- Aircraft › Aircraft oper/perf/capability
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
A witness reported that the pilot's first landing attempt was too high, and the airplane went around. During the second landing attempt, the airplane was "still too high and came in too fast." The airplane touched down past the runway midpoint, and as the airplane neared the end of the runway, the witness heard the engine "rev up" and saw the airplane depart the runway in a "very nose high" pitch attitude. The airplane subsequently collided with terrain about 1,000 ft beyond the departure end of the runway and about 75 to 100 ft below the runway surface elevation. The pilot reported that he did not recall the events of the accident, but stated that there were no mechanical anomalies with the airplane. The accident is consistent with the pilot's delayed decision to conduct a go-around following an unstable approach and long landing, which resulted in the airplane having insufficient airspeed to climb after the attempted go-around and impact with terrain.
Probable cause
The pilot's delayed decision to conduct a go-around following an unstable landing approach and long landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR18LA203
- Event ID
- 20180725X83254
- Case number
- WPR18LA203
- 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: 586662a4914fee75e433ac9c13ce96cfb13c7f07d54df1649da6895f838d5167; retrieved 2026-09-16T07:59:06.608Z.