ATL98FA063 · William Sargent LANCAIR 235 LANCAIR 23
William Sargent LANCAIR 235 LANCAIR 23 · Accident: in flight encounter with weather
From St Clair County International Airport (PHN) to Lakeland Linder International Airport (LAL)
Event
- NTSB case
- ATL98FA063
- 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
- Unknown
William Sargent LANCAIR 235 LANCAIR 23
- Aircraft type
- William Sargent LANCAIR 235
- 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
- N813Y
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From St Clair County International Airport (PHN), Port Huron, MITo Lakeland Linder International Airport (LAL), Lakeland, FL
- 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
- Unknown
- 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 › Clearance, not maintained
- Pilot in command › VFR flight into imc, attempted
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The circumstances of the flight and of the accident are not known. On the afternoon of April 18, 1998, the Rescue Coordination Center received an Emergency Locator Transmitter (ELT) signal from the vicinity of the accident site. A search conducted by the Civil Air Patrol (CAP) and local authorities located the aircraft wreckage on the morning of April 19, 1998. According to local authorities, at the approximate time of the ELT signal, low clouds obscured the tops of the mountains in the immediate vicinity of the accident site (3,100 feet above mean sea level). A search of FAA records failed to show that the pilot had received a preflight weather briefing. An examination of the accident site disclosed that the airplane was broken into three pieces and the wreckage path was orientated on a 170-degree magnetic heading. Aircraft wreckage debris was scattered over an area about 150 feet long and 50 feet wide. The airplane wreckage rested on a steep mountain ridge with near vertical drop-offs on both sides of the ridge. The wreckage was never removed from the accident site.
Probable cause
The pilot's attempt to operate in instrument meteorological conditions and his failure to maintain clearance with the surrounding terrain. Contributing factors were clouds and the mountainous/hilly terrain.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ATL98FA063
- Event ID
- 20001211X09799
- Case number
- ATL98FA063
- 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: 1ce46f3bd05b085df810bb6e9ef25a762b46d5c3e99ca66c660f4ff844028553; retrieved 2026-09-20T22:37:29.809Z.