CEN20CA178 · General Atomics MQ-9B
General Atomics MQ-9B · Accident: loss of control in flight during landing
From SJT` · San Angelo, TX to SJT` · San Angelo, TX
Narrative check · The NTSB narrative appears to contradict this record's departure or destination. Values are shown as recorded, not corrected; compare with the narrative.
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN20CA178
- 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
- Event fatalities
- Unknown
- 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
- Government
- 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
General Atomics MQ-9B
- Aircraft type
- General Atomics MQ-9
- 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
- CBP213
- Operator
- Customs and Border Protection
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route Narrative disagrees
- From SJT` · San Angelo, TXTo SJT` · San Angelo, TX
- Aircraft age
- About 9 years (built 2011)
- 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
- Public Aircraft
- 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 · flare/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
- 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
- Destroyed
Cause areas
- Aircraft › Aircraft oper/perf/capability
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot of the unmanned aircraft system (UAS) attempted a touch-and-go landing but then performed a go-around due to an unstable approach. The pilot re-entered the UAS into the traffic pattern for a second touch-and-go landing attempt, during which it initially touched down nose first and induced a porpoise. During the third porpoise, the UAS contacted the runway in a nose-down attitude resulting in a hard landing and post-crash fire. The UAS was destroyed by the post-crash fire. There was no mechanical malfunction/failure of the UAS at the time of the accident.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain an adequate landing flare that resulted in a porpoise and impact with terrain.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN20CA178
- Event ID
- 20200515X23324
- Case number
- CEN20CA178
- 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: 527df87721a336273c0f900dd81838f5c8c4fe1fef5768a35198788883736d88; retrieved 2026-09-16T11:36:29.052Z.