ERA22LA094 · Piper J3C 65
Piper J3C 65 · Accident: loss of control on ground during landing
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA22LA094
- 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 J3C 65
- Aircraft type
- Piper J3
- 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
- N656CJ
- Operator
- Palmer Thomas W
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 75 years (built 1946)
- 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
- Aircraft › Aircraft systems
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot was receiving instruction for his tailwheel endorsement. While the flight instructor and pilot were landing the tandem-seat, tailwheel-equipped airplane, the airplane bounced. The flight instructor communicated to the pilot “my controls” and blocked him (using the rear seat control stick) from pushing the front seat control stick forward, so that the flight instructor could transition from a bounced wheel landing into a three-point landing. The flight instructor stated, the pilot did transfer control to the flight instructor but didn’t take his feet off the brakes. The pilot stated he was unfamiliar with using heel brakes and applied to much pressure to the brakes, “upon touch down after the bounce we nosed forward and flipped onto our back,” resulting in substantial damage to the rudder. The pilot reported that the airplane had no preimpact mechanical malfunctions or failures that would have precluded normal operation.
Probable cause
The pilot’s inadvertent application of brakes during touchdown, which resulted in a noseover.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA22LA094
- Event ID
- 20211223104438
- Case number
- ERA22LA094
- 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: c50821f2a491618bee07e8629bf325240ad55ece8a1d57fa45eb30da259526e0; retrieved 2026-09-16T14:50:59.988Z.