CHI98FA343 · Piper PA-22-150
Piper PA-22-150 · Accident: in flight encounter with weather en route
From Princeton, WI to Palmyra Municipal Airport (88C)
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI98FA343
- 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
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
Piper PA-22-150
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-22
- 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
- N2931Z
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Princeton, WITo Palmyra Municipal Airport (88C), Palmyra, WI
- 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
- 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 adverse weather, continued
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight was a positioning flight for the aircraft to receive an annual inspection. Weather en route was instrument meteorological conditions. The aircraft crashed into a lake in uncontrolled flight. The pilot was not instrument rated. Inspection of the airframe and engine revealed no evidence of any preexisting anomalies with the aircraft.
Probable cause
The continued flight into adverse weather conditions and aircraft control not maintained by the pilot-in-command. Contributing factors were the improper preflight planning/preparation and lack of certification by the pilot-in-command in addition to the weather conditions.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI98FA343
- Event ID
- 20001211X10787
- Case number
- CHI98FA343
- 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: 40407cd06d23cfca1d670e844e6fb18b4f7b0a6de723710378fe0acc0a5e1e21; retrieved 2026-09-20T22:27:04.081Z.