FTW98FA088 · Mooney M20K
Mooney M20K · Accident: loss of control in flight en route
From T98 · San Marcos, TX to Garden City Regional Airport (GCK)
Event
- NTSB case
- FTW98FA088
- 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 M20K
- 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
- N231DS
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From T98 · San Marcos, TXTo Garden City Regional Airport (GCK), Garden City, KS
- 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
- Loss of control in flight
- 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
- Reason for occurrence undetermined
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The single-engine airplane was established at a cruising altitude of 12,000 feet MSL. The instrument rated commercial pilot requested a descent to a lower altitude and was given clearance to descend to 10,000 feet by ATC. After the pilot acknowledged the clearance, radar contact and voice communications from the aircraft were lost. No distress calls were received from the aircraft. The wreckage of the airplane, which had impacted the ground in a near vertical attitude, was found by a search and rescue helicopter in an open field. Several aural witnesses, located near the accident site, reported hearing a very loud engine noise followed by silence. Several residents in the vicinity reported the local weather to be foggy, with freezing rain, and low clouds. The aircraft, which was not equipped for flight in icing conditions, was operating within the boundaries of a current weather advisory, which called for rime icing in the clouds below 8,000 feet. No mechanical anomalies were found during examination of the wreckage. Pilots flying various types of aircraft in the vicinity of the accident site had reported light to moderate icing in the clouds from 16,000 feet to 4,000 feet. According to the NTSB meteorologist, it was likely that the pilot could have encountered IMC conditions with light to moderate icing.
Probable cause
the loss of control during cruise flight for undetermined reasons.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record FTW98FA088
- Event ID
- 20001211X09418
- Case number
- FTW98FA088
- 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: 2c092f15ec72e2b9c84d93923e3cc3260aa5e5ebcd4bc7e25a4e8faa382a4773; retrieved 2026-09-20T22:42:31.787Z.