MIA98FA039 · Christen Industries A-1
Christen Industries A-1 · Accident: in flight collision with object
From Six Oaks Airport (NC67) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- MIA98FA039
- 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
- Visual Meteorological Cond
Christen Industries A-1
- Aircraft type
- Christen A-1
- 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
- N9613P
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Six Oaks Airport (NC67)To 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
- Other
- 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 collision with object
- 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
- Wire, static
- 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 › Clearance, not maintained
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane was seen flying low, in a westerly direction, through a valley about 5 miles west of the departure airport. The airplane struck a utility wire that stretched north and south across the valley and a road. The airplane then continued on a heading of 340 degrees for about 500 feet where the right wing separated from the airframe. The airplane came to rest about 300 feet south of a private home, in the front yard. The home was owned by the the pilot/owner's cousin. Two men sitting in a pickup truck near the crash site said in a statement to police, they were in the truck with the engine off and the windows down. The driver said they were sitting there for about 5 minutes when he looked out his left window and saw the airplane coming toward them. The driver said he 'does not recall hearing the engine running' on the airplane as it was coming down. The driver told his passenger to 'duck he's going to hit us.' In addition, the truck's driver said, '...he [saw] the right wing hit a cable,' and then come off just before impact with the ground. Local residents said that the pilot/owner of the airplane lived in a house a short distance west of the crash site, and had flown around the area often. The airplane had not been seen in the area on the day of the accident. It was revealed that rescue workers had remove the utility wire that was wrapped around the airframe in order to extract the victim from the cockpit. The wire was found lying to the right rear of the airplane. The right wing had separated from the airframe and was located east of the main wreckage. The right wing displayed wire strike marks on the wing strut. The strut was found separated from the wing. Examination of the engine and propeller did not reveal any discrepancies.
Probable cause
the pilot's failure to maintain clearance from a wire.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record MIA98FA039
- Event ID
- 20001208X09342
- Case number
- MIA98FA039
- 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: fa41ec2f0350bdcbc9891e88582f0b54144b896380a3496994f3e1f1c1651fe2; retrieved 2026-09-20T22:44:41.168Z.