FTW99FA104 · Piper PA-46-350P
Piper PA-46-350P · Accident: in flight encounter with weather en route
From Nashville International Airport (BNA) to Addison Airport (ADS)
Event
- NTSB case
- FTW99FA104
- 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
- 1 · 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
- General aviation
- WeatherVisual meteorological conditions (VMC): good enough to fly by looking outside. Instrument conditions (IMC): cloud or low visibility, flying by instruments. Glossary
- Visual Meteorological Cond
Piper PA-46-350P
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-46
- 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
- N497CA
- Operator
- Robert R. Meredith · private individual
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Nashville International Airport (BNA), Nashville, TNTo Addison Airport (ADS), Dallas, TX
- 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 91: General Aviation
- 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 · 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
- Destroyed
Cause areas
- Pilot in command › Aircraft control, not maintained
- Pilot in command › Design stress limits of aircraft, exceeded
- Pilot in command › Flight into adverse weather, encountered
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
While in cruise flight at 24,000 feet msl, the pilot of the Piper Malibu Mirage advised Memphis Center that he had encountered icing conditions and was experiencing a fuel imbalance. The pilot requested and was cleared to deviate to the north. Subsequently, radio and radar contact were lost. A witness reported hearing the sound of the airplane's engine stop running and observed the airplane descending from the dark clouds in a nose down attitude and rotating clockwise. Residents of the area reported that the weather at the time of the accident was high ceilings with heavy rain just before and after the accident. There were thunderstorms with lightning in the area at the time of the accident. The wreckage of the airplane was scattered along an area of about four miles. The airplane was equipped with an autopilot, weather radar, and an ice protection system. The pilot had recently purchased the 1999 model airplane and had completed a Mirage initial training course. At the time of the accident the pilot had accumulated a total of 21.4 hours in the make and model of the accident aircraft. No anomalies were found with the airframe or engine that would have prevented normal operation.
Probable cause
The pilot's encounter with adverse weather and loss of aircraft control, which resulted in exceeding the aircraft's design stress limits. Factors were the pilot's lack of total experience in the make and model of airplane, and the icing and thunderstorm weather conditions.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record FTW99FA104
- Event ID
- 20001205X00458
- Case number
- FTW99FA104
- 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: 3ead5c4ca3f50837f0a56f158e5f3c28ab47bc7b44eac804400c54e690ae033c; retrieved 2026-09-20T22:10:12.258Z.