LAX97FA032 · Piper PA-34-200
Piper PA-34-200 · Accident: in flight encounter with weather en route
From Molokai Airport (MKK) to Kahului International Airport (OGG)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX97FA032
- 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
- 5 · 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-34-200
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-34
- 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
- N1701K
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Molokai Airport (MKK), Kaunakakai, HITo Kahului International Airport (OGG), Kahului, HI
- 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
- 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 › Altitude/clearance, not maintained
- Pilot in command › VFR flight into imc, inadvertent
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The noninstrument-rated commercial pilot departed in VFR conditions at twilight. En route, the pilot encountered marginal VFR conditions. Radar data showed that the aircraft made a gradual left turn toward rising terrain, as it entered an area of poor weather. Subsequently, it flew into rising wooded terrain at an elevation of about 1,600 feet, near the top of a mountainous ridge. Witnesses in a sparsely inhabited rural area located about 3 miles from the accident site reported that the light condition was 'pitch black,' when the aircraft flew low over their location, and that instrument meteorological conditions (IMC) prevailed. 'Torrential' rains, which had just ended at their location, continued in the area where the aircraft impacted terrain. No preaccident mechanical malfunction of the aircraft was found. Another pilot, who had flown the aircraft recently, stated that the heading indicator would precess 30 degrees in 10 minutes. The pilot's flight instructor said that he (the pilot) was working toward an instrument rating, but was not yet qualified to fly by reference to instruments.
Probable cause
the pilot's inadvertent VFR flight into instrument meteorological conditions (IMC), and his failure to maintain sufficient clearance and/or altitude from mountainous terrain. Factors related to the accident were: darkness, adverse weather conditions, and mountainous terrain.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX97FA032
- Event ID
- 20001208X07053
- Case number
- LAX97FA032
- 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: local date, investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 1996-11-02.
- API snapshot SHA-256: ac7dac9b8fe9f638e1aef4fda4e6797ae4a29ae865f2bc9665756f4150f1e200; retrieved 2026-09-20T23:08:28.989Z.