MIA96LA208 · Beech A36
Beech A36 · Accident: in flight encounter with weather en route
From Great Harbour Cay Airport (MYBG) to President Donald J. Trump International Airport (KPBI)
Event
- NTSB case
- MIA96LA208
- 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
Beech A36
- Aircraft type
- Beechcraft 36
- 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
- N976WL
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Great Harbour Cay Airport (MYBG), GREAT HARBOR CYTo President Donald J. Trump International Airport (KPBI), West Palm Beach, FL
- 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
- Reason for occurrence undetermined
Not plotted · Location withheld: coordinates are missing, conflicting, invalid, or have no accepted acquisition method. No substitute location has been invented.
NTSB narrative
During cruise flight at 10,000 feet without weather avoidance radar on board the airplane, the flight encountered adverse weather associated with a level 3 weather echo. Altitude excursions of 5,000 fpm and 4,000 fpm decreases and increases were noted respectively. Groundspeed excursions were also noted. Radar and radio contact were lost, when the flight was at 8,400 feet. Recovered wreckage revealed no evidence of heat damage. According to a friend of the pilot, he had little actual instrument experience and would have avoided adverse weather. The pilot did not obtain a weather briefing with an FAA facility nor with DUAT.
Probable cause
an inflight collision with the terrain (water) for undetermined reason(s). Factors relating to the accident were: failure of the pilot to obtain a preflight weather briefing, his failure to obtain in-flight weather avoidance assistance, and his resultant inadvertent encounter with a level three thunderstorm.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record MIA96LA208
- Event ID
- 20001208X06578
- Case number
- MIA96LA208
- 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: b1b01f221b60cd40371c49ea68137f445b830be6cdcfed23b4b37d6cb617125c; retrieved 2026-09-20T23:14:00.497Z.