ERA19TA278 · Cessna 208 B
Cessna 208 B · Accident: loss of control in flight on approach
From Pepperell Airport (26MA) to Pepperell Airport (26MA)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA19TA278
- 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
Cessna 208 B
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 208
- 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
- N895SF
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Pepperell Airport (26MA), Pepperell, MATo Pepperell Airport (26MA), Pepperell, MA
- Aircraft age
- About 31 years (built 1988)
- 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
- Approach · VFR pattern final
- 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 in flight
- 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
- Environmental issues › Conditions/weather/phenomena
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The commercial pilot, 10 skydivers, and 1 passenger departed on a skydiving flight. After the skydivers jumped, the pilot and passenger returned to the airport to land. The pilot stated that, during the landing, he encountered a sudden downdraft and the airplane dropped out of the air from about 10 to 15 ft above the runway. The airplane landed hard and the nose landing gear collapsed; the airplane slid to the right side of the runway, crossed the parallel runway, and impacted a tree. Examination of the airplane revealed that the left wing was bent up about 3 ft from the wing tip and the nose landing gear was fracture-separated. The pilot stated that there were no mechanical anomalies with the airplane that would have precluded normal operation. Thus, it is likely that the pilot failed to maintain airplane control during the landing, which resulted in a hard landing.
Probable cause
The pilot's loss of control when the airplane encountered a downdraft during landing approach, which resulted in a subsequent hard landing and gear collapse.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA19TA278
- Event ID
- 20190920X52540
- Case number
- ERA19TA278
- 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, cause areas. 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: d7beed1be4ca0f5cdd941624bd7e318734d1a0f2f7f08fa4e488f9cce76b105c; retrieved 2026-09-16T10:11:12.769Z.