Corporate Air Cessna 208B accident
Cessna 208B · Accident: loss of control in flight on approach
From Grand Forks International Airport (GFK) to Bismarck Municipal Airport (BIS)
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI98FA119
- 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
- Charter & commuter
- 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
Cessna 208B
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 208
- 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
- N868FE
- Operator
- Corporate Air
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Grand Forks International Airport (GFK), Grand Forks, NDTo Bismarck Municipal Airport (BIS)
- 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 135: Air Taxi & Commuter
- 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
- Approach · IFR final approach
- 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
- 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 › Airspeed, inadequate
- Pilot in command › Stall, inadvertent
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane was making an instrument landing system approach in instrument meteological icing conditions when control was lost. The airplane impacted the terrain 1.6 miles from the approach end on the runway. The airplane contacted the terrain with the left wing first prior to cartwheeling and coming to rest approximately 120 feet from the point of first impact. The pilot had 19 hours total flight time in Cessna 208's of which 1.9 hours were in actual instrument meteorological conditions.
Probable cause
the pilot's failure to maintain adequate airspeed during the approach which resulted in an inadvertant stall. Factors associated with the accident were the icing conditions and the pilot's low level experience in this make and model of airplane.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI98FA119
- Event ID
- 20001211X09806
- Case number
- CHI98FA119
- 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: eddbacf5cbb233c31075b371fb5f423a373acf2092977845889e02cf883bffb3; retrieved 2026-09-18T13:24:50.087Z.