LAX96FA249 · Piper PA-24-250
Piper PA-24-250 · Accident: in flight collision with terrain/water en route
From Baker Airport (0O2) to Lake Havasu City Airport (HII)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX96FA249
- 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
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
Piper PA-24-250
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-24
- 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
- N7304P
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Baker Airport (0O2), NERVINO, CATo Lake Havasu City Airport (HII), LAKE HAVASU, AZ
- 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 collision with terrain/water
- Also codedOther events the NTSB coded in the sequence, such as a wire strike after a loss of power. Flight Findings uses them for its kinds of event. Glossary
- Visual flight rules (VFR) flight into instrument meteorological conditions (IMC)
- 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 › VFR flight into imc, intentional
- Pilot in command › Weather evaluation, improper
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The non-instrument rated pilot departed northern California on December 23, 1995, on a cross-country flight to Arizona. He did not file a flight plan. He failed to arrive and a search was initiated without success. On June 27, 1996, microwave technicians spotted the wreckage en route to an antenna site. The aircraft collided with the crest of a ridge line in a near level cruise flight attitude. The emergency locator beacon had been destroyed by impact and postcrash fire damage. A resort in the area had been called during the initial search to see if the pilot landed there as he had in the past. Resort personnel reported that there had been no aircraft traffic that day due to low clouds, rain, and snow showers. The wreckage was located about 16 miles from the resort.
Probable cause
the non-instrument rated pilot's intentional VFR flight into instrument meteorological conditions.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX96FA249
- Event ID
- 20001207X05023
- Case number
- LAX96FA249
- 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: 9fcc081bb5dc91a5386f321bf8cf679297fc8a8735f3acd7bd2ae1c0a267c474; retrieved 2026-09-20T23:29:07.284Z.