ERA24LA165 · Beech A36
Beech A36 · Accident: hard landing
From Norfolk International Airport (ORF) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA24LA165
- 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
Beech A36
- Aircraft type
- Beechcraft 36
- 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
- N1861M
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Norfolk International Airport (ORF), Norfolk, VATo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 43 years (built 1981)
- 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 · flare/touchdown
- 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
- Aircraft › Aircraft oper/perf/capability
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot was conducting a practice instrument landing system approach in visual meteorological conditions. During the landing approach, the pilot was provided a caution for wake turbulence due to a departing regional jet. During the landing flare, about 5 feet above the runway, the airplane descended suddenly and impacted the ground hard on the main landing gear before it “rocked to [the] nosewheel harshly.” The pilot attempted to abort the landing the airplane did not respond as he expected, and after several more bounces down the runway the airplane came to rest with its nose resting on the ground. A small postaccident fire damaged the area around the airplane’s engine, and the airplane’s wings were substantially damaged during the accident. The pilot stated that there were no preimpact mechanical malfunctions or failures of the airplane that would have precluded normal operation. Airport surveillance video and data recovered from the airplane’s electronic flight instruments showed that at the time of the accident a 10 to 13 knot left quartering headwind prevailed. Additionally, review of air traffic control data showed that an airliner had departed from a parallel runway about 1 minute before the accident airplane crossed the runway threshold. The parallel runway was to the right, and downwind of the runway the accident pilot was approaching, therefore it is unlikely that wake turbulence from the departing airplane impacted the accident airplane.
Probable cause
The pilot’s failure to maintain control of the airplane during landing, resulting in a hard, bounced landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA24LA165
- Event ID
- 20240407194040
- Case number
- ERA24LA165
- 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: 1496844dbf913a5fd9dd82dba22c12500ccf892cd9004d9eba141fa7f322acf6; retrieved 2026-09-16T18:38:45.042Z.