ERA26LA101 · Cessna 170
Cessna 170 · Accident: runway excursion during takeoff
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA26LA101
- 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
Cessna 170
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 170
- 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
- N4178V
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 78 years (built 1948)
- 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
- Takeoff · rejected takeoff
- 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
- Runway excursion
- 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
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
While attempting to take off from a 2,100-ft-long turf runway the pilot observed an abnormal airspeed indication and aborted the takeoff. The airplane then overran the runway, impacted a fence post with the left main landing gear, and nosed over resulting in substantial damage to the right wing and vertical stabilizer. After the accident, the pilot suspected that the pitot tube butterfly cover may have become stuck resulting in the erroneous airspeed indication. Postaccident examination of the airplane’s pitot tube butterfly cover by an FAA inspector revealed no evidence of any preaccident mechanical malfunctions or failures that would have precluded normal operation. Had the pilot aborted the takeoff sooner, or continued the takeoff despite the airspeed indication anomaly, it is likely that the accident could have been prevented.
Probable cause
The pilot’s decision to abort the takeoff with insufficient runway remaining, which resulted in a runway overrun and impact with a fence post.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA26LA101
- Event ID
- 20260202202368
- Case number
- ERA26LA101
- 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: aaf3af09a8c5c7f504c9fc739e251b9cc3463bad961da30a6e781b841d8efc68; retrieved 2026-09-16T20:42:30.827Z.