WPR21LA174 · Piper PA-28-180
Piper PA-28-180 · Accident: collision during takeoff/landing
From Safford Regional Airport (SAD) to Taylor Airport (TYL)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR21LA174
- 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
- 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 PA-28-180
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-28
- 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
- N222BM
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Safford Regional Airport (SAD), Safford, AZTo Taylor Airport (TYL), Taylor, AZ
- Aircraft age
- About 55 years (built 1966)
- 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
- 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
- Personnel issues › Psychological
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot reported that, he became disoriented during a day visual flight rules (VFR), cross-country flight. After a nearly five-hour flight in search of his destination airport, he saw an airport and landed. After a brief conversation on the ground with witnesses, he refueled the airplane and departed in search of his original destination airport. Unable to locate his desired airport and five hours later as the day had turned to night, he spotted an airport and initiated an approach to the east. During the night VFR approach, the engine lost power, but the pilot switched fuel tanks and completed an engine restart inflight. However, the airplane did not touch down on airport property. The airplane landed outside of the airport’s southern perimeter fence, near Airport Road and the southeast airport access gate. The airplane impacted the airport’s perimeter fence and sustained substantial damage to the fuselage and the left wing.
Probable cause
The pilot’s loss of situational awareness and failure to touchdown on the runway which resulted in a collision with the airport’s perimeter fence.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR21LA174
- Event ID
- 20210422102965
- Case number
- WPR21LA174
- 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: local date, investigation status, cause areas. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2021-04-12.
- API snapshot SHA-256: fbc2cda181c0a0acb7854d2033527d86146e7b2c1014e2eda2cb89d7154de5e1; retrieved 2026-09-16T13:58:49.205Z.