CEN20TA025 · Piper PA34 200
Us Aviation Group Piper PA34 200 · Accident: hard landing
From Denton Enterprise Airport (DTO) to Mount Pleasant Regional Airport (OSA)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN20TA025
- 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
- 0
- 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 PA34 200
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA34
- 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
- N15412
- Operator
- US Aviation Group
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Denton Enterprise Airport (DTO), Denton, TXTo Mount Pleasant Regional Airport (OSA), Mount Pleasant, TX
- Aircraft age
- About 47 years (built 1972)
- 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
- Hard 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
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
During the instructional cross-country flight, the pilot receiving instruction was in the left seat and manipulating the flight controls. During the landing attempt, the airplane bounced and became airborne again with a nose-high pitch attitude. The flight instructor took control of the airplane and continued the landing. Witnesses observed the airplane land hard, bounce, then the nose gear collapsed and punctured the fuselage and the windscreen. The airplane slid on the runway and came to rest upright. A postaccident examination revealed that the nose landing gear mounting structure was fractured at the lower truss. The mount was displaced upward and punctured the fuselage. The nose tire was partially deflated. The damage to the mounting structure was consistent with a hard landing on the nose landing gear.
Probable cause
The pilot's hard, bounced landing and the flight instructor's delayed remedial action, which resulted in a fracture of the nose landing gear mounting structure.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN20TA025
- Event ID
- 20191126X43854
- Case number
- CEN20TA025
- 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: 9a34d60ab37cadadae64e982ceb97814d15a93c8fa7fb8f95dfc8c2a62172bc2; retrieved 2026-09-16T10:41:47.202Z.