CHI94FA036 · Piper PA-28-180
Piper PA-28-180 · Accident: in flight collision with terrain/water en route
From 3HA · Lansing, IL to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI94FA036
- 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
- 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-28-180
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-28
- 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
- N32303
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From 3HA · Lansing, ILTo not recorded
- 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 · descent
- 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 collision with terrain/water
- 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 › Proper altitude, not maintained
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The private, instrument rated, pilot had waited at the fixed base operator's facility for several hours to go flying. When he signed out the airplane, an employee stated the pilot said: 'I'm going up to do a cloud check.' There was no record of a weather brief being given to the pilot by the Kankakee Automated Flight Service Station. A flight instructor who had been practicing for a Part 135 flight check and landed five minutes before the pilot took off, reported the ceiling was 700 feet overcast. There was also light rain and fog in the vicinity. The airplane crashed in an open field. The property owner where the airplane crashed reported: 'The motor was really buzzing, and it sounded like an explosion when it hit.' The attitude was wings level. The wreckage came to rest 210 feet from the point of initial impact facing opposite the direction of travel. The examination of the wreckage did not reveal any malfunction of the engine or airframe.
Probable cause
the failure of the pilot to maintain proper altitude. A factor related to the accident was flight into known adverse weather by the pilot.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI94FA036
- Event ID
- 20001211X13713
- Case number
- CHI94FA036
- 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: 3cb04d868babdbb8e9e43102cff9cab7833fb8fac1e2719faabc0bf7c669d1a1; retrieved 2026-09-21T00:19:17.668Z.