ERA20CA185 · Piper PA22 150
Piper PA22 150 · Accident: loss of control on ground during landing
From Fayetteville Municipal Airport (FYM) to Fayetteville Municipal Airport (FYM)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA20CA185
- 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 PA22 150
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA22
- 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
- N4454A
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Fayetteville Municipal Airport (FYM), Fayetteville, TNTo Fayetteville Municipal Airport (FYM), Fayetteville, TN
- Aircraft age
- About 64 years (built 1956)
- 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 · landing roll
- 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 on ground
- 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
- 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
The pilot reported that he was performing touch and go landings. On his third landing, he knew there was a crosswind from his left side, so he touched down with the left main landing gear first. When the right main landing gear touched down, the airplane started to veer off to the left, so he corrected with right rudder and the airplane pulled hard to the right. The pilot then saw a ditch on the right side of the runway, so he applied "hard left rudder" to purposefully put the airplane into a ground loop so the airplane would not go off the runway and into the ditch. During the ground loop, the right main landing gear fractured and folded under the fuselage.
Examination of the airplane by a Federal Aviation Administration inspector revealed that the right main landing gear tube fractured, and that the fracture surfaces did not display corrosion. The right wing rear spar and the lower longeron were substantially damaged. Examination of the flight controls and brakes showed no evidence of any preaccident anomalies.
At the time of the accident a left crosswind component of between 9 and 17 knots prevailed.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain directional control during landing in gusting crosswind conditions.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA20CA185
- Event ID
- 20200512X25803
- Case number
- ERA20CA185
- 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 UTC date the NTSB stores; the local time zone is not recorded, so the local date may differ by a day.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 65faa58c11f6e2143899457ffb0da12d9ed7c436747b4343908f94c12588230f; retrieved 2026-09-16T11:35:15.426Z.