ERA26LA220 · Piper PA-28-180
Piper PA-28-180 · Accident: hard landing
From Delaware Coastal Airport (GED) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA26LA220
- 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
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
- N55739
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Delaware Coastal Airport (GED), Georgetown, DETo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 53 years (built 1973)
- 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 › Action/decision
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot stated that he made an unstable approach, after which the airplane landed hard and bounced. A gust of wind caught the airplane’s right wing during the bounce and the airplane veered off the left side of the runway. The left wing collided with a runway marker light and a directional sign, which resulted in substantial damage to the wing spar and punctured the fuel tank. The pilot was able to get the airplane back on the runway and aborted the landing. Once airborne, he smelled fuel, declared an emergency and landed without further incident. The pilot reported there were no mechanical issues that contributed to the accident and that he should have gone around versus trying to force a landing.
Probable cause
The pilot’s improper decision to continue with an unstabilized approach, which resulted in a hard landing, loss of directional control, and collision with a runway marker light and sign.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA26LA220
- Event ID
- 20260529203077
- Case number
- ERA26LA220
- 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: dea1ee5131829d0c1cd80cb95dc78dc25768811e3e86f2d32b5db6e39b28b159; retrieved 2026-09-16T21:34:28.521Z.