CHI98FA070 · Piper PA-32-301
Piper PA-32-301 · Accident: loss of control in flight while maneuvering
From Northwest Alabama Regional Airport (MSL) to C38
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI98FA070
- 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
- 4 · 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-32-301
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-32
- 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
- N2586Y
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Northwest Alabama Regional Airport (MSL), Muscle Shoals, ALTo C38
- 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
- Maneuvering
- 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
- Loss of control in flight
- 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
- Stall/mush
- 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 › Flight into known adverse weather, intentional
- Pilot in command › Stall/mush, inadvertent
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot received a weather briefing, and subsequently filed an IFR flight plan to the Casa De Aero Airport, Hampshire, Illinois. The Air Traffic Control Specialist asked the pilot if he had the AIRMETs for turbulence and IFR conditions along his route of flight. The pilot responded, 'Yeah, turbulence, icing and IFR, it's lovely.' While en route, the pilot contacted the Kankakee, Illinois, FSS, and requested weather conditions at DuPage County Airport, West Chicago, Illinois. The pilot was informed that DuPage was 400 feet agl overcast, 5 miles visibility and mist, temperature and dew point of 1 degree Celsius. The pilot then inquired about the weather at Madison, Wisconsin, and was told the weather was a broken ceiling of 800 feet agl, 1 1/2 mile visibility with light freezing drizzle, and a temperature of minus 1 degree Celsius. The pilot then checked in with the Chicago TRACON and reported level at 4,000 feet msl. At 1838, the controller cleared the pilot for the VOR alpha approach into Casa De Aero Airport, and subsequently told the pilot, 'frequency change is approved, and be sure you get to me to cancel [the IFR flight plan] please. I'm protecting the airspace.' At 1848, the airplane dropped below radar coverage and was not heard from again. The controller suspected that the airplane had landed. At 2200, a satellite mission control center began receiving the airplane's ELT signal. At 0230 cst, a CAP ground team narrowed the location of the ELT signal to a field behind a rural residence. Weather conditions precluded the ground team from entering the field until daybreak. The airplane was located at 0813 cst. Examination of the wreckage revealed areas of rime ice, approximately 1/4 inch thick adhering to the leading edges of the left and right horizontal stabilators, the leading edge of the vertical stabilizer, and along a 30-inch section of the leading edge of the right wing at mid-span. No other anomalies with the airplane were revealed.
Probable cause
the pilot's intentional flight into known icing conditions, and the accumulation of ice on the leading edges of the airplane's empennage and wings leading to the inadvertent stall/mush. A factor contributing to this accident was the icing conditions.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI98FA070
- Event ID
- 20001208X09267
- Case number
- CHI98FA070
- 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 1997-12-23.
- API snapshot SHA-256: df905da5c68e902aac47a0af8c69ebcd9003b8a1e606f0470a3b6843f4e8a839; retrieved 2026-09-20T22:43:10.329Z.