ERA24LA149 · Piper PA28 181
Orlando Flight Academy Piper PA28 181 · Accident: aircraft/propeller/rotor contact with person while taxiing
From Crystal River Airport (CGC) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA24LA149
- 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 PA28 181
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA28
- 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
- N686JA
- Operator
- Orlando Flight Academy
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Crystal River Airport (CGC), Crystal River, FLTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 2 years (built 2022)
- 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
- Taxi · from runway
- 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
- Aircraft/propeller/rotor contact with person
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Minor
Cause areas
- Personnel issues › Psychological
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The student pilot had landed following completion of a solo cross-country flight and was taxiing the airplane along a taxiway. A video from a security camera depicted the airplane taxiing while an individual who was not wearing visible hearing protection, audio headphones, or wearing visibility-enhancing outer clothing was performing landscape work with a powered edger alongside a building. As the airplane approached the location of the building travelling at what the pilot reported as a “standard ground speed,” the landscape worker, who reported he did not notice the airplane approaching from his left, moved towards the taxiway. As the airplane continued along the taxiway centerline, the worker moved to the edge of the taxiway with his head tilted down and then turned to the right to follow the edge of the taxiway placing his back to the approaching airplane. The outboard portion of the airplane’s right wing near the wingtip contacted the worker and knocked him forcefully to the ground resulting in serious injuries. The airplane veered slightly to the right off centerline before stopping. Postaccident examination of the airplane by a Federal Aviation Administration inspector revealed that the airplane’s wing had incurred minor damage. The inspector also found that there were no discrepancies with the airplane’s braking or steering systems, nor did the pilot report any. Additionally, there were no skid marks on the taxiway and the main landing gear tires did not exhibit any flat spots consistent with no heavy braking having been applied before the collision.
Probable cause
The pilot and the landscape worker’s inadequate visual lookout, which resulted in a collision.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA24LA149
- Event ID
- 20240320193970
- Case number
- ERA24LA149
- 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, coordinates, 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: 27fc5020f382590b56febced013008603845ce736d8b90f7d79f8e7c06315e2d; retrieved 2026-09-16T18:36:53.790Z.