CHI99FA140 · Piper PA-28R-201
Piper PA-28R-201 · Accident: loss of control in flight during initial climb
From an unrecorded airport to Grosse Ile Municipal Airport (ONZ)
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI99FA140
- 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
- 3 · 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-28R-201
- 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
- N5274A
- Operator
- Richard Bradley Mohammed
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo Grosse Ile Municipal Airport (ONZ), Detroit, MI
- 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/mush; Tree(s)
- 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 › Stall/mush, inadvertent
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot's father was positioned at the departure end of runway 09. From there, he watched the airplane make its takeoff run. He said that the airplane was about 1,000 feet down the runway when it got into the air. 'The plane went up about 35 to 50 feet [above the ground] and flew down the runway without gaining altitude. It was wobbling and veered off to the left, crashing into the trees, and then exploded.' The airstrip was oriented on a 090-270 magnetic heading. On the 090 degree orientation, the airstrip was 2,500 feet in usable length, with 500 additional feet beyond what was marked as the departure end of the airstrip. At the end of the 3,000 total feet was a heavily-wooded area consisting of 50 to 60 foot high pine trees. Examination of the wreckage revealed no anomalies. The PA-28R-201 Pilot's Operating Handbook, Takeoff Performance Tables show that for a 2,750 pound airplane, a temperature of 21 degrees Centigrade, pressure altitude of 1180 feet mean sea level, zero wind, and using 25 degrees of flaps, the takeoff distance to clear a 50 foot barrier is 2,000 feet. For the same conditions, but using a zero flap setting, the takeoff distance needed to clear a 50 foot barrier is 2,750 feet.
Probable cause
the inadvertent stall/mush. Factor which contributed to this accident were the pilot's inadequate preflight planning, the premature lift-off during the takeoff, the airplane's low airspeed following lift-off, and the trees.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI99FA140
- Event ID
- 20001212X18705
- Case number
- CHI99FA140
- 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: e45774a550483e883e503bd35b39af344b2ddd4c230b805f57d152127d92b5b9; retrieved 2026-09-20T22:08:09.809Z.