CEN26LA164 · Piper PA-28-180
Splendid Aviation-Victoria Piper PA-28-180 · Accident: loss of engine power (total) on approach
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN26LA164
- 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
- Ongoing
- 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 PA-28-180
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-28
- 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
- N317HM
- Operator
- Splendid Aviation-Victoria
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 60 years (built 1966)
- 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
- Approach
- 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
- Loss of engine power (total)
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Destroyed
Cause areas
No findings designated as a cause are recorded in the NTSB data yet.
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
On April 13, 2026, about 19:19 central daylight time, a Piper Cherokee PA-28-180 airplane, N317HM was destroyed when it was involved in an accident near Corpus Christi, Texas. The flight instructor and student pilot were seriously injured. The airplane was operated under the provisions of Title 14 Code of Federal Regulations Part 91 as an instructional flight. ADS-B data revealed that the airplane departed Corpus Christi International Airport (CRP), Corpus Christi, Texas, about 1850. According to first responders, the flight instructor and student pilot said that they were practicing touch and go takeoffs and landings at CRP when they had an engine issue on short final for runway 13. The flight instructor said that he took over flying the airplane when he realized they were having an engine issue. The airplane struck power lines and impacted a service road about .5 nm northwest of runway 13. A postimpact fire ensued. According to the owner of the flight school, the student pilot was transitioning from flying a Cessna 172 to a Piper Cherokee. The flight school owner also said that according to fuel records, they filled the airplane with 14 gallons of fuel before the flight for a total of 36 gallons. The airplane had a 100-hour inspection on April 1, 2026, and accumulated about 23 flight hours since the inspection. In the previous three months, the right magneto and right magneto p-lead were replaced as well as the starter ring gear. The airplane was retained for further examination.
Verbatim NTSB factual narrative from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN26LA164
- Event ID
- 20260414202818
- Case number
- CEN26LA164
- 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: local date, investigation status, coordinates. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2026-04-14.
- API snapshot SHA-256: ba9bc84405a2a3ab52cac523261b566969c57578cfee29cf89aeb04d8d526ebf; retrieved 2026-09-16T21:13:50.307Z.