The Cessna 172 pilot was using an iPad for navigation, and mistakenly landed in a field near Watertown, Conn., rather than his intended destination, an airport with a turf runway.
After landing, he taxied the airplane to a corner of the field and commenced a takeoff roll, estimating the available takeoff distance to be about 600 feet.
Just after takeoff, the left wing hit a tree and the plane subsequently hit the ground, resulting in substantial damage to the left wing and engine firewall and minor injuries to the pilot.
The NTSB determined the probable cause as the pilot’s decision to takeoff from a field which resulted in a collision with trees and the ground. Contributing to the accident was the pilot’s failure to correctly identify the destination airport and runway, which resulted in an off-airport landing in the field.
NTSB Identification: ERA14CA430
This September 2014 accident report is provided by the National Transportation Safety Board. Published as an educational tool, it is intended to help pilots learn from the misfortunes of others.
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I don’t what navigation with an iPad has to do with the initial landing at the wrong place, or the subsequent decision to take off from the short field.
It seems like correlation without causation, to me…
What drug was he high on with that he couldn’t see that this was a field and not a grass runway of a airport?
Just because you can get into it doesn’t mean you can get out of it.
Navigation by iPad has downsides. It’s not like landing at the wrong asphalted airport hasn’t happened to professional aircrews. (It has). The error occurred when the pilot firewalled the throttle before doing some very thorough performance calculations + accurate measurements during a pre-takeoff assessment of the runway environment.
Darwin was right…