FTW98FA185 · Young GLASAIR III GLASAIR II
Young GLASAIR III GLASAIR II · Accident: in flight encounter with weather en route
From Lake Charles Regional Airport (LCH) to Lakeland Linder International Airport (LAL)
Event
- NTSB case
- FTW98FA185
- 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
- Visual Meteorological Cond
Young GLASAIR III GLASAIR II
- Aircraft type
- Young GLASAIR
- 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
- N238BC
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Lake Charles Regional Airport (LCH), Lake Charles, LATo 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
- 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 › Aircraft control, not maintained
- Pilot in command › Flight into known adverse weather, continued
- Pilot in command › VFR flight into imc, inadvertent
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The non-instrument rated commercial pilot lost control of the airplane after encountering instrument meteorological conditions and moderate to severe turbulence while on a night cross-country flight. The wreckage of the airplane was located the following day in a remote unpopulated area approximately 19 miles east of Lafayette. There were no reported eye witnesses to the accident. Prior to the loss of control, the pilot received VFR traffic advisories from Air Traffic Control (ATC) while conducting flight at 11,500 feet. Radar and radio contact were lost when the airplane was about 20 nautical miles east of Lafayette. The airplane was last observed by radar at 10,200 feet. No distress calls were received from the aircraft. ATC advised the pilot of a weather advisory which called for a 30mile wide area of moderate to severe turbulence from 4,000 to 12,000 feet associated with wind shear. About 20 minutes prior to the accident, a pilot of an ATR72 airplane reported encountering moderate to severe turbulence between 5,000 and 8,000 feet, about 10.5 nm north of the accident site. The pilot had been provided with weather advisories calling for adverse weather and marginal VFR along his anticipated route of flight. No structural or mechanical anomalies were observed during an examination of the airplane.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain control of the aircraft as a result of VFR flight into instrument meteorological conditions and flight into known adverse weather conditions. Contributing factors were turbulence, clouds, dark night and lack of an instrument rating.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record FTW98FA185
- Event ID
- 20001211X09843
- Case number
- FTW98FA185
- 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: local date, investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 1998-04-17.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 32ee8124bf8458fb59c46ba0bdd9ba88fc6ac785358468ddbc867008ac5696a3; retrieved 2026-09-20T22:37:33.322Z.