ATL99FA081 · Piper PA-24-180
Piper PA-24-180 · Accident: loss of control in flight during initial climb
From Vicksburg Municipal Airport (VKS) to 2F8 · Bastrop, LA
Event
- NTSB case
- ATL99FA081
- 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
Piper PA-24-180
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-24
- 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
- N5900P
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Vicksburg Municipal Airport (VKS), MSTo 2F8 · Bastrop, LA
- 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
- Initial climb
- 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
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Pilot in command › Airspeed, not obtained/maintained
- Pilot in command › Stall, inadvertent
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
At 2215, the pilot and his three passengers arrive at the airport and board the airplane. A witness stated that he waved at the airplane as it took off. According to the police report, a few minutes after takeoff, the witness at the airport received a telephone call that reported a downed airplane near Warrenton Lane. Reportedly, this information was not relayed to the local emergency services. The following morning friends of the pilot and passengers began inquiring at the about the location of their friends. Airport personnel contacted the local police and the airplane was found about 1.1 miles off the departure end of runway 01, in a heavily wooded area. Examination of the wreckage found that the airplane had impacted the ground in a 55-degree nose down attitude after striking a tree with the left wing. The airplane came to rest upright on a heading of 090 degrees. No mechanical problems were discovered during the examination of the wreckage.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to obtain and maintain flying speed that resulted in an inadvertent stall, and the collision with trees. A factor is the dark night.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ATL99FA081
- Event ID
- 20001212X18683
- Case number
- ATL99FA081
- 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 1999-05-08.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 9cc71602e0b29a020e0128ac5a4bb1398f698eb97fea1fb1c3f832962d502447; retrieved 2026-09-20T22:07:39.704Z.