Skip to content

Atlas / NTSB / ERA21LA204

NTSB CAROL · Event

Event ERA21LA204

2021-05-03 Winchester, Virginia, United States Airport · OKV Minor 1 aircraft Status: Completed

Aircraft involved

Probable cause & findings

The pilot’s loss of directional control on landing. Contributing to the outcome was the pilot’s decision to continue the aborted landing after the airplane had departed the runway surface.

Factual narrative

According to the student pilot, she was practicing soft field and short field landings. She made five uneventful short field landings and was going to switch to soft field landings. While on approach, she noticed the airplane was left of centerline therefore during touchdown, she applied right rudder and right aileron. The airplane turned right, then turned left, and was heading off the runway. She then decided to abort the landing; however, the nose wheel was not straight and when she applied full power, the airplane veered off the left side of the runway and toward a row of hangars. The airplane struck the door of a hangar with the right wing, propeller, and then the left wing before coming to a stop on the ramp, which resulted in substantial damage to the wings, fuselage, and engine mounts. The owner reported that there were no preimpact mechanical malfunctions or failures with the airplane that would have precluded normal operation. Source: NTSB Aviation Accident Database Retrieved: 2026-02-12

NTSB Findings

Hierarchical cause / factor breakdown from the FAA bulk avdata database. Each finding tagged C (Cause) or F (Factor).

  • Aircraft-Aircraft oper/perf/capability-Performance/control parameters-Directional control-Not attained/maintained
  • Personnel issues-Task performance-Use of equip/info-Aircraft control-Pilot
  • Personnel issues-Action/decision-Info processing/decision-Decision making/judgment-Pilot

Verbatim from NTSB's published report. Source file NTSB_2021_ERA21LA204.txt. Findings + structured fields enriched from FAA avall.mdb. Full investigation docket on data.ntsb.gov ↗.

Related research

What the literature says.

Academic papers and agency reports matching this event's aircraft type or causal vocabulary (icing). Sourced from NASA NTRS, NTSB Safety Studies, FAA CAMI, AOPA Air Safety Institute, Embry-Riddle Scholarly Commons, arXiv, and the Semantic Scholar academic graph.

Browse the full corpus — academia portal ↗