CHI98FA153 · Commander 114-B
Commander 114-B · Accident: loss of control in flight en route
From Waukesha County Airport (UES) to John Glenn Columbus International Airport (CMH)
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI98FA153
- 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
- 4 · 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
Commander 114-B
- Aircraft type
- Commander 114
- 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
- N6059C
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Waukesha County Airport (UES), Waukesha, WITo John Glenn Columbus International Airport (CMH)
- 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
- Pilot in command › Aircraft control, not maintained
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The accident airplane's pilot obtained a weather briefing for the accident flight the night before the flight. He filed an instrument flight rules (IFR) flight plan with the intention of flying the airplane at 154 knots. The airplane departed on the IFR flight plan and climbed to 6,900 feet above mean sea level (MSL) and maintained that altitude for about four minutes while on a southwesterly heading. Weather information showed cloud bases and tops to be about 6,000 and 10,000 feet MSL respectively in the airplane's immediate vicinity. The altitude began to vary about 200 to 300 feet above and below 6,900 feet MSL. The airplane's ground track changed a number of times during the flight. The aircraft heading changed as much as 90 degrees while altitude changes were occurring. The last FAA air traffic control radar contact with the airplane showed the altitude to be 4,500 feet MSL and the heading to be opposite of its original heading. Ground witnesses reported hearing the airplane's engine accelerating and decelerating followed by a "... ka-boom..." sound. One said he saw the airplane coming out of the clouds nose first and pointing at the ground. Another said he saw the airplane come out of the clouds tumbling without its empennage. The on-scene examination revealed no pre-existing anomalies with the airframe. Before flying the accident airplane as pilot-in-command, the pilot received 11.6 hours of flight training in the aircraft. His total time in the airplane was 23.2 hours according to his logbook. The pilot's logbook showed he had 18.5 hours of actual instrument flight time and 41.4 hours of simulated instrument time. His logbook showed he had flown .6 hours of simulated instruments in the accident airplane before the accident flight.
Probable cause
the pilot not maintaining aircraft control during cruise flight and exceeding the airplane's design stress limits. Factors in this accident was the pilot's lack of total experience in the airplane and the clouds.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI98FA153
- Event ID
- 20001211X09995
- Case number
- CHI98FA153
- 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: 232b1bf5d9a297b814650a46f15fffa36822af5e308afcbb20bdbd02fb26866d; retrieved 2026-09-20T22:35:28.028Z.