FTW98FA121 · Mooney M20E
Mooney M20E · Accident: in flight encounter with weather en route
From Santa Fe Municipal Airport (SAF) to Angel Fire Airport (AXX)
Event
- NTSB case
- FTW98FA121
- 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
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
Mooney M20E
- 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
- N9213M
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Santa Fe Municipal Airport (SAF), Santa Fe, NMTo Angel Fire Airport (AXX), Angel Fire, NM
- 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
- 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
- Visual flight rules (VFR) flight into instrument meteorological conditions (IMC)
- 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 › VFR flight into imc, attempted
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane disappeared on a flight from Santa Fe to Angel Fire, New Mexico. The pilot did not obtain a weather briefing nor file a flight plan. The wreckage was located three days later in mountainous terrain at the 10,700 foot level. A witness told SAR personnel he had seen a low wing airplane 'flying in and out of the cloud bottoms' in the vicinity and at about the time of the accident. A meteorological study indicated moderate to severe turbulence associated with mountain wave activity, and marginal VFR conditions in the mountains. Radar data indicated that minutes before the accident, the airplane's altitude varied between 11,700 and 13,100 feet, ground speed reached a low of 64 knots and a high of 270 knots, and vertical speed varied between +4,800 and -6,000 feet per minute (+80 and -100 feet per second). At one point, the airplane made a complete 360 degree circle.
Probable cause
The pilot attempting VFR flight into instrument meteorological conditions and his lack of an instrument rating. Factors were weather conditions that included mountain wave activity conducive to turbulence, and clouds obscuring the mountainous terrain.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record FTW98FA121
- Event ID
- 20001211X09537
- Case number
- FTW98FA121
- 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: b19712d955758ae42e4991b7462847953df3ccfe5d7018badcc408db3ce14cef; retrieved 2026-09-20T22:41:09.073Z.