CHI98LA034 · Piper PA-28-235
Piper PA-28-235 · Accident: in flight encounter with weather en route
From Montezuma Coöp Airport (67KS) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI98LA034
- 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
- 0 · 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-28-235
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-28
- 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
- N9404W
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Montezuma Coöp Airport (67KS), Montezuma, KSTo not recorded
- 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
- Anti-ice/deice system, pitot heat › Not activated
- Pilot in command › Altitude/clearance, not maintained
- Pilot in command › Flight into adverse weather, continued
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot encountered freezing rain during a night cross-country flight at 5,000 feet above mean sea level (msl). He said his windshield had iced up during the flight. According to the pilot, he began a descent to prepare for a landing as he neared his destination. During the descent, the pilot noted his altimeter did not move below 4,000 feet msl. The pilot continued the descent until colliding with the ground. He said the altimeter indication went to 3,000 feet msl when the airplane collided with the ground. The accident site's terrain elevation was about 3,000 feet msl. The pilot said he did not turn on the pitot heat during the flight. The altimeter static port was on the aft side of the pitot-tube. During an altimeter bench-check, the altimeter functioned normally except it indicated between 50 and 120 feet low at various altitudes. There was no indication of sticking or rough operation at any altitude tested. The pilot did not obtain a weather briefing before departing on the accident flight.
Probable cause
the pilot's continued flight into adverse weather conditions, his failure to activate the pitot heat system, and his failure to maintain clearance from the terrain. Factors associated with this accident were: the pilot did not obtain a preflight weather briefing, the adverse weather (icing) condition, and accumulation of ice on the windshield.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI98LA034
- Event ID
- 20001208X09146
- Case number
- CHI98LA034
- 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 1997-11-12.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 5a6f70cb595a7f124d6e611c5bd68e19cf28c0364ade6a029f1b54a12b51919e; retrieved 2026-09-21T21:05:16.982Z.