ERA24LA142 · Piper J3C-65
Piper J3C-65 · Accident: ground collision while standing
From an unrecorded airport to Plant City Municipal Airport (PCM)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA24LA142
- 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
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
- N71093
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo Plant City Municipal Airport (PCM), Plant City, FL
- Aircraft age
- About 78 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
- Standing · engine(s) start-up
- 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
- Ground collision
- 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 oper/perf/capability
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
After refueling his airplane at an intermediate stop and while waiting to start the engine after an unsuccessful attempt, the pilot was approached by an airport tenant who offered some alternate engine-start advice. When subsequent attempts to start the engine failed, the pilot decided to attempt an engine start by manually rotating the propeller while the tenant adjusted the engine controls from outside the airplane. The engine subsequently started at a high rpm. The airplane departed from the chocks and struck an unoccupied parked airplane, which resulted in substantial damage to the left wing and fuselage. The pilot was able to shut the engine down and observed that the throttle was in the “halfway position.” The pilot did not report any mechanical failures or malfunctions with the airplane that would have precluded normal operation.
Probable cause
The pilot’s failure to confirm the throttle position before attempting to start the airplane’s engine by manually rotating the propeller, which resulted in a loss of airplane control.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA24LA142
- Event ID
- 20240318193951
- Case number
- ERA24LA142
- 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: 502ab4dfaec56d5a7ba68af7668806d76585aa9afce64082aff3f3c641d83933; retrieved 2026-09-16T18:36:04.297Z.