Ram Air Frieght Piper PA-32R-300 accident
Piper PA-32R-300 · Accident: in flight encounter with weather en route
From Newport News Williamsburg International Airport (PHF) to Richmond International Airport (RIC)
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC99LA073
- 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
- Charter & commuter
- WeatherVisual meteorological conditions (VMC): good enough to fly by looking outside. Instrument conditions (IMC): cloud or low visibility, flying by instruments. Glossary
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
Piper PA-32R-300
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-32
- 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
- N5454F
- Operator
- Ram Air Frieght
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Newport News Williamsburg International Airport (PHF), Newport News, VATo Richmond International Airport (RIC)
- Aircraft age
- Not recorded
- 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 135: Air Taxi & Commuter
- 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
- En route · climb to cruise
- First occurrenceThe 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
- In flight encounter with weather
- 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
- Pilot in command › Preflight planning/preparation, inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot departed in VMC conditions towards the destination airport. As the flight progressed, the cloud base began to lower and the visibility decreased. Unable to maintain VFR, the pilot obtained an IFR clearance and was told to climb to 2,000, then to 4,000 feet. While climbing from 2,000 feet to 4,000 feet, ice accumulation was noticed on the windshield of the airplane. Level at 4,000 feet, the ice accumulation continued, and the airplane descended back to 2,000 feet where ice no longer accumulated. On approach, as the airplane descended through a cloud layer about 500 feet from the ground, the ice began to shed from the airplane. Due to ice remaining on the windshield, the pilot had difficulty judging the distance to the runway and had to look through the side window of the airplane to maintain visual reference with the ground. The airplane touched down on the runway hard, and the main landing gear pushed up through the wings. Records revealed that the pilot did not obtain a weather briefing from FSS. An AIRMET was issued for light occasional moderate rime and mixed icing in clouds and precipitation below 22,000 feet along the pilot's route of flight.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadequate preflight planning/preparation which resulted in flight into icing weather conditions. A factor related to the accident was restricted visibility through the icy windshield during landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC99LA073
- Event ID
- 20001205X00382
- Case number
- NYC99LA073
- Dataset
- historical-pre2008
- Source SHA-256
- 89e2df6d848e7ab3b42e7d7c7a03ff403303057a26ca04c95b3ea67201c3ce74
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. 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: 1458ecfb63c95e42d4faac0d4a1aa112925c2e5115fd5e22a627d94f675662ed; retrieved 2026-09-18T16:58:27.616Z.