Wisconsin Aviation Piper PA-23-250 accident
Piper PA-23-250 · Accident: in flight encounter with weather en route
From Roseau Municipal Rudy Billberg Field (ROX) to Watertown Municipal Airport (RYV)
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI00LA073
- 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
- Charter & commuter
- 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-23-250
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-23
- 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
- N106RS
- Operator
- Wisconsin Aviation
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Roseau Municipal Rudy Billberg Field (ROX), Roseau, MNTo Watertown Municipal Airport (RYV), Watertown, WI
- 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 135: Air Taxi & Commuter
- 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 · 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 encounter with weather
- 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 › Directional control, not maintained
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane sustained substantial damage during a precautionary landing after experiencing ice accumulation in cruise flight. The pilot received a full weather briefing the previous night and updated weather on the day of the flight. The pilot updated his flight plan to change his route of flight to avoid an area of heavy precipitation. The aircraft began to accumulate ice in cruise flight. Other aircraft along the route of flight reported icing at altitudes above and below the accident aircraft's altitude. The rate of accumulation of ice began to increase and the pilot contacted air traffic control and requested and received clearance to climb. The airplane was unable to climb higher than about 8,000 feet msl. The ice accumulation rate was such that the heated windscreen would not keep the windscreen clear. The pilot contacted ATC and requested immediate vectors to the nearest airport, where he executed a precautionary landing. The runway was snow covered with a coating of ice beneath the snow, and the windscreen was still iced over. The aircraft slid off the runway and struck a snowbank. Postaccident examination of the aircraft failed to reveal any anomalies. The aircraft was equipped and certified for flight into known icing conditions.
Probable cause
the pilots failure to maintain directional control. Factors to the accident were the icing conditions, the snow and ice covered runway and the snowbank.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI00LA073
- Event ID
- 20001212X20460
- Case number
- CHI00LA073
- 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: 7b32f09530289575d396fe5adda42e98fd75e5161b50ed1161df1cda4e0af097; retrieved 2026-09-18T16:48:58.289Z.