ERA24LA250 · Piper PA28R 201
Piper PA28R 201 · Accident: aircraft structural failure before flight
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA24LA250
- 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
- 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 PA28R 201
- 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
- N287ND
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 24 years (built 2000)
- 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
- Prior to flight
- 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 structural failure
- 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 structures
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
During a preflight inspection of a flight school airplane, the flight instructor noticed a missing rivet on the left side of the vertical stabilizer. He also noticed that the skin of the vertical stabilizer was bent outwards. The flight instructor walked around to the right side of the airplane and noticed that the same rivet was missing on that side, and the skin was also bent outwards. He called the maintenance department out to the airplane to look at the damage. They subsequently told him the airplane was not airworthy and to write it up as a discrepancy. The maintenance department immediately grounded all the other airplanes and inspected the vertical stabilizers for any damage. No other damage was noted on the remaining 49 airplanes of the flight school operator’s fleet. It could not be determined when the damage to the vertical stabilizer occurred, but the damage was likely the result of excessive side loading of the vertical stabilizer during flight.
Probable cause
Excessive side loading of the vertical stabilizer.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA24LA250
- Event ID
- 20240610194424
- Case number
- ERA24LA250
- 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: fb93bb14f0c57c3eccb3d2d96a8d2f778db7905fb2eb81d5aa88af18c4c1d5ba; retrieved 2026-09-16T18:51:57.260Z.