On July 25, 1980, at 0713, Air Pennsylvania 501, a Piper PA-31-350 Navajo aircraft, crashed while making a visual approach to runway 27R at Philadelphia International Airport, Pennsylvania. The aircraft, a scheduled commuter flight from Reading, Pennsylvania, arrived in the Philadelphia Approach Control area as a VFR 'pop-up' flight and was sequenced to land behind United Flight 555, a Boeing 727 IFR arrival, on runway 27R. Witnesses stated that, when Flight 501 was about 1/2 mile on final approach, it rolled from side to side, pitched up, rolled inverted to the left, and flew into the ground nose first. All three persons aboard the aircraft were killed and the aircraft was destroyed. The National Transportation Safety Board determines that the probable cause of the accident was the loss of aircraft control due to an encounter with wake turbulence from the preceding aircraft at an altitude too low for recovery and the pilot's failure to follow established separation and flightpath selection procedures for wake turbulence avoidance.


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    Title :

    Aircraft Accident Report - Air Pennsylvania 501, Piper PA-31-350, N5MS Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, July 25, 1980


    Publication date :

    1981


    Size :

    27 pages


    Type of media :

    Report


    Type of material :

    No indication


    Language :

    English