CHI99GA185 · Piper PA-18-150
Piper PA-18-150 · Accident: loss of control in flight while maneuvering
From MN to Bemidji Regional Airport (BJI)
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI99GA185
- 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
- Visual Meteorological Cond
Piper PA-18-150
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-18
- 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
- N305NR
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From MNTo Bemidji Regional Airport (BJI), Bemidji, MN
- 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
- Maneuvering
- 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
- Destroyed
Cause areas
- Pilot in command › Stall, inadvertent
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane impacted the marsh in a nearly vertical nose down attitude. The propeller and engine were buried in about three feet of water and mud. The wings and tail cone remained attached to the fuselage and were in a vertical position. The leading edges of the left and right wings exhibited leading edge crush along the entire span of the wings. The tail cone was buckled forward. Flight control continuity was established from the cockpit to the flight controls. The examination of the engine revealed no pre-impact anomalies. The propeller blades exhibited chordwise scratching and nicks in the leading edges of the blades. The pilot had approximately 167 flight hours in the accident airplane. He had demonstrated his proficiency with stalls and slow flight in the accident airplane when he had his Biennial Flight Review on April 25, 1999. The airplane's stall warning horn had been deactivated soon after it was obtained in 1977. The airplane's total time was 7,067 hours. The moose telemetry flights were conducted between 200 to 500 feet agl.
Probable cause
the pilot inadvertently stalled the airplane. A factor was the low altitude.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI99GA185
- Event ID
- 20001212X18932
- Case number
- CHI99GA185
- 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: 8cd13ee5c02e15171bc4ec9d3817c5dd3e76aab0aa32bfd869564048710bd36a; retrieved 2026-09-20T22:03:32.166Z.