ERA19LA269 · Mooney M20J
Mooney M20J · Accident: collision during takeoff/landing
From Freeway Airport (W00) to Yeager Airport (CRW)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA19LA269
- 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
Mooney M20J
- Aircraft type
- Mooney M20
- 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
- N202JB
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Freeway Airport (W00), Bowie, MDTo Yeager Airport (CRW), Charleston, WV
- Aircraft age
- About 41 years (built 1978)
- 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
- Takeoff · rejected 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
- Collision during takeoff/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
- Aircraft › Aircraft systems
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot performed a preflight inspection of the airplane and noted no anomalies. The pilot initiated the takeoff roll and noted that the airplane’s airspeed never rose above 40 mph. The airplane was about one-third to halfway down the 2,420-ft runway when the pilot elected to abort the takeoff then overran the departure end of the runway. The airplane broke through the airport perimeter fence and struck a car on a highway just off the airport property, which resulted in the left wing separating from the fuselage. Postaccident examination of the airplane was unable to find any anomalies with the airspeed indicator, pitot tube, or pitot static system between the left-wing root and the airspeed indicator that would have precluded normal operation. Due to the wing’s impact damage, investigators were unable to functionally test the portion of the pitot system between the pitot tube and the left-wing root. It is possible that the pitot static system was blocked during the accident flight, preventing the airspeed indicator from displaying airspeeds above 40 mph and leading the pilot to decide to abort the takeoff, then the blockage became dislodged during the accident sequence.
Probable cause
A blockage of the pitot static system that preclude the airspeed indicator from displaying speeds greater than 40 mph, which led the pilot to abort the landing and overrun the runway.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA19LA269
- Event ID
- 20190912X21218
- Case number
- ERA19LA269
- 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: 74d54e9319dc802d2a2c722e9b0aeacdc89d0d1db655dde384fbb062735cd77d; retrieved 2026-09-16T10:03:32.403Z.