Fatal ... Provincetown, MA 1/4/2026

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PaulS

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N9360E. There was a pretty tight base to final with an overshoot, strong NE winds (tailwind on a right base for runway 25) could partially account for that. But it looks like it was corrected just prior to the runway. The accident itself may have followed a touch and go or late go-around. The aircraft reached 78 knots of groundspeed and 75’ of (uncorrected) altitude at the last ADS-B ping.

IMG_7324.jpeg

Accident happened just shy of 2005z

METAR KPVC 041956Z AUTO 32015G18KT 10SM SCT029 BKN038 M02/M06 A3001 RMK AO2 SLP160 T10171061 FZRANO PNO $
 
Yesterday was not a great day for flying here. We got a bunch of unexpected snow in the morning and it never really cleared up. No better than about a 7/8 cloud cover all day.

Last week, I took the club VR7 on a cross country round robin with my first stop being PVC. I opted for 7 because it was pretty much a light crosswind from either runway but the waves indicated the winds were slightly favoring 7. Just like every other time I've landed there, the winds do some weird stuff when you get close to the ground due to the surrounding dunes on nearly all sides. The runway (as you can see in the above picture) is right on the water. I landed hard, taxied with the intention of going back to 7 but then I saw the reeds were blowing a little more to 25. So I took off on 25. Marginally better.

It's a club plane from Taunton. Just one pilot on board so I presume he was doing the same as I did last week. Some VFR proficiency. I believe the weather was significantly better towards Taunton but based on what the football game in Foxborough looked like, I could be wrong.

Interesting ADS-B track. Stall on go around? Or is that final rise a glitch in the track? I suppose you could do a touch and go in a C172 there but I wouldn't advise it.
 
A 172 can catch you with your pants down on a go-around that you're not planning for. Trim is aft, landing flaps, the nose will pitch up a lot when full power is applied. Add some wind gusts and a go-around stall is a very real possibility.
 
AV8R_87 said:
A 172 can catch you with your pants down on a go-around that you're not planning for. Trim is aft, landing flaps, the nose will pitch up a lot when full power is applied. Add some wind gusts and a go-around stall is a very real possibility.
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Yes, there are a number of video online of it happening. Was my 1st thought when I saw the flight trace and was wondering if it was a 172 or similar Cessna. Don't know if that what is what happened but would be my 1st guess as a related factor.

Was just practicing go-around from full flap approaches yesterday with a student along with the potential failure of the flaps to retract scenario.

Brian
CFIIIG/ASEL
 
I had a close call in a go around a long time ago. If you don't know better, it's possible to think you have enough energy because you have airspeed on the way down, but you have an engine at idle. Set pitch based on that being enough to climb out and you have a problem. There's not much excess energy and it's easy to lose it quickly.
 
brcase said:
Yes, there are a number of video online of it happening. Was my 1st thought when I saw the flight trace and was wondering if it was a 172 or similar Cessna. Don't know if that what is what happened but would be my 1st guess as a related factor.

Was just practicing go-around from full flap approaches yesterday with a student along with the potential failure of the flaps to retract scenario.

Brian
CFIIIG/ASEL
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I have never thought about what to do if flaps fail to retract on a go around. I guess it would be treated just like slow flight and you have to do minimal amount of bank
 
Nikhiln25 said:
I have never thought about what to do if flaps fail to retract on a go around. I guess it would be treated just like slow flight and you have to do minimal amount of bank
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in almost 40 years of flying and a 1000+ hrs in 172's I have had it happen 4 times that I recall. 3 were in 3 different 172's but all three incidents occurred within about 3 months of each other. One we were doing slow flight with about 20 degrees of flaps and couldn't retract them. One I had just landed and could not retract them and the 3rd was on a go around, fortunately we had only deployed about 20 degrees of flaps.

The 4th event was in a 170 with Manual flaps and we had a headset cable manage to foul itself into the locking mechanism of the flap so we could not retract the flap fully after landing.

and yes pretty much like slow flight, Rule #1 don't let it stall. On a hot day and heavy that might mean flying into a controlled crash. Practicing it we used about 60kts on a cool day with 2 of us in the plane with a 2500ft msl airport we could fly a low pattern to a landing

Brian
CFIIG
 
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The prelim was recently released and it reads much worse than we all thought. It would appear the pilot descended too fast with too slow an airspeed for the crosswind and actually contacted ground before making it to the threshold. Those dunes around the field are quite high. After the initial contact, it appears he pulled up and stalled it. It doesn't look like a go-around to me. Rather it appears the plane was being forced to the ground and the crosswind caused some ballooning, maybe?

 
KE5BM said:
The prelim was recently released and it reads much worse than we all thought. It would appear the pilot descended too fast with too slow an airspeed for the crosswind and actually contacted ground before making it to the threshold. Those dunes around the field are quite high. After the initial contact, it appears he pulled up and stalled it. It doesn't look like a go-around to me. Rather it appears the plane was being forced to the ground and the crosswind caused some ballooning, maybe?

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Interestingly, the NTSB prelims increasingly display and digest pretty much the same ADS-B data the public has already seen.

This approach looked low but the finer details, especially with regard to altitude, are hard to confirm with data alone. It wouldn’t be the first case of a plane striking the runway nose-low and either bouncing/ballooning, or attempting a go-around and not having the energy to do so before losing control. That could be due to powerplant/prop damage and/or the incurred attitude combined with energy state of the aircraft. Or a lot of other combinations - this is a really dynamic set of consequences and actions that manifest rather quickly.
 
Maybe just me, but that approach looks awful. What jumps out first is the last bit of being way too shallow, but leading up to that it looks like he had a decent descent rate/angle setup, but didn't make the turns when he should have. Maybe being pushed toward the runway because of the crosswind, and didn't want to tighten the turn and overshoot, instead kind of went a bit more downwind, maybe decreased the descent rate a bit and then turned base to final much farther from the runway than he should have been for his height. Maybe that descent rate went up in that last turn, because he was keeping his speed up in the tighter turn.

Or in other words he didn't manage his descent rate right for the longer downwind and turns, and came out too low, too far.

If all that guessing is right, it put him in a spot where he was lined up for the approach, but way too low. I can't tell if he was trying to fly level at the same altitude and then land, kinda dragging it in, or he was climbing to try to fix the approach. But either way, looks like he wasn't trying to initiate a go-around then.

Fast forward a half a mile or so, he then touches down in some configuration before the runway. Keeping along with my guessing, he applies power and goes up after that, and then - guessing again - stalls it, attempts to recover but runs out of altitude. He hit the runway hard. That part's not a guess. From the report, all three gear, the belly of the plane, the prop, and one wingtip all hit. I'll stop the guessing at that point, because for all I know he might have well have been a passenger at that point.

I'm overthinking this, all guessing. I have trouble getting it out of my head, though. Perfectly good airplane, good weather, daytime, fatal accident. It's the second one of those in the past few months in the NE that I'm aware of, and it just seems senseless. He didn't stall/spin to final, neither did the other one, but the approach was screwed up...or at least that's how it looks to me. I want to go back in time and yell at the pilot "too low on the approach could kill you, pretend like there's an obstacle at the end that you have to clear, to make sure you don't screw up the angle".
 
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