CHI97FA058 · Mooney M20J
Mooney M20J · Accident: uncontrolled altitude deviation on approach
From Dane County Regional Truax Field (MSN) to Saint Paul Downtown Holman Field (STP)
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI97FA058
- 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
- 2 · 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
Mooney M20J
- Aircraft type
- Mooney M20
- 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
- N1160G
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Dane County Regional Truax Field (MSN), Madison, WITo Saint Paul Downtown Holman Field (STP), ST PAUL, MN
- 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
- Approach · IFR initial approach
- 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
- Uncontrolled altitude deviation
- 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
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The aircraft was destroyed when it collided with snow covered terrain during an ILS runway 32 approach to the St Paul Downtown Holman Field Airport. The pilot had planned to fly to Cambridge, Minnesota, where the airplane was based, but requested a diversion into Holman Field, due to weather. No abnormalities with any navigational equipment were found. A review of the airframe and engine did not reveal any abnormalities. Radar data indicated that the aircraft's altitude varied by more than 1,300 feet from the assigned altitude during the instrument approach. During the altitude deviations, the controller issued a heading change to the pilot. The pilot's logbook indicated that this was the pilot's first instrument approach, in actual IFR conditions, in this airplane. The pilot had flown 4.1 hours of actual instrument time in the past 2 years.
Probable cause
failure of the pilot to maintain control of the airplane during an ILS approach. Factors relating to the accident were: the IFR weather conditions, the pilot's lack of recent instrument experience, and the pilot's lack of familiarity in flying the accident aircraft.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI97FA058
- Event ID
- 20001208X07262
- Case number
- CHI97FA058
- 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: 33a1e56b9245ff85035a5ee35cf565ce1db819e7bc9337e78163cc867824549b; retrieved 2026-09-20T23:03:35.447Z.