ERA22LA232 · Justice Frank K VANS RV-6A
Justice Frank K VANS RV-6A · Accident: hard landing
From Lancaster County-Mc Whirter Field (LKR) to Hendersonville Airport (0A7)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA22LA232
- 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
Justice Frank K VANS RV-6A
- Aircraft type
- Justice Frank VANS RV-6A
- 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
- N7FJ
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Lancaster County-Mc Whirter Field (LKR), Lancaster, SCTo Hendersonville Airport (0A7), Hendersonville, NC
- Aircraft age
- About 25 years (built 1997)
- 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
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot reported that following a normal approach to landing, about 20 ft above the runway he encountered a “slight tail wind.” He reported that at this point, “I should have gone around” but he believed the landing was salvageable. Subsequently, the airplane touched down hard, and he maneuvered the airplane off the runway into grass where the airplane nosed over. The empennage and fuselage sustained substantial damage. The pilot reported that there were no preimpact mechanical malfunctions or failures with the airplane that would have precluded normal operation.
Probable cause
The pilot’s failure to go-around during an unstable approach, which resulted in a hard landing, runway excursion, and nose over.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA22LA232
- Event ID
- 20220520105108
- Case number
- ERA22LA232
- 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: 78d90d9aa4a683a2cd40b8a444dab768352bc5a20a2f6c323b804db3d233b177; retrieved 2026-09-16T15:14:35.695Z.