MIA99LA238 · Piper PA-28-140
Piper PA-28-140 · Accident: in flight collision with object en route
From 4R3 to Baton Rouge Metropolitan Airport (BTR)
Event
- NTSB case
- MIA99LA238
- 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
- 0 · 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-28-140
- 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
- N6685J
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From 4R3To Baton Rouge Metropolitan Airport (BTR), Baton Rouge, 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
- En route · climb to 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 collision with object
- 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
- 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
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Pilot in command › Aircraft weight and balance, exceeded
- Pilot in command › Preflight planning/preparation, inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
According to the pilot he calculated the weight for this flight and came up with total weight of '...860 pounds, 5.5 pound over weight limit.' He said he '...did a complete check off on everything in the cockpit, and a static run-up only produced 2400 RPM's instead of 2500 RPM's the engine usually produced.' He rotated the airplane at 80 mph, it climbed to about 100 to 150 feet and entered 'some turbulence, at this time it felt like something was pushing the airplane to the ground...[he] decided the airplane was not going to climb over the trees and started turning off the fuel selector switch, the master switch, and we went into the trees.' According to the FAA inspector's statement, the airplane was at '...max gross weight at takeoff and encountered a down draft.' The stall warning light came on, the pilot lowered the nose to prevent a stall, the airplane was unable to maintain altitude and hit trees at end of runway. The reported temperature in the area about the time of the accident was about 90 degrees F. The wind were variable at 4 knots. The calculated density altitude was 2332 feet.
Probable cause
the pilot's inadequate preflight planning and preparation, which resulted in taking off with the airplane's maximum gross weight exceeded, and subsequent impact with trees. Factors in this accident were high temperatures and an in-flight encounter with a downdraft.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record MIA99LA238
- Event ID
- 20001212X19603
- Case number
- MIA99LA238
- 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: ab4c0592b78aa3ce2c6615f1df998e571e19bfa1fb78b8a3a790e6068f83f86e; retrieved 2026-09-21T20:24:56.750Z.