CHI00FA090 · Piper PA-28-140
Piper PA-28-140 · Accident: loss of control in flight en route
From FTG · Denver, CO to Wichita Dwight D. Eisenhower National Airport (ICT)
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI00FA090
- 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
- Instrument 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
- N4494X
- Operator
- Jesse Joseph Perham
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From FTG · Denver, COTo Wichita Dwight D. Eisenhower National Airport (ICT), Wichita, KS
- 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 · 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
- 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/spin
- 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/spin, inadvertent
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot contacted his wife an hour before taking off from Denver, Colorado, en route to Wichita, Kansas. He told her that he would be in Wichita in 4 hours. The airplane departed at 1700 mst on a VFR flight plan. An instrument flight plan was filed by the pilot, in flight, with Denver Air Route Traffic Control Center (ARTCC). The airplane was handed off to the Kansas City ARTCC. No radio contact was established between the airplane and Kansas City ARTCC. At 2015 cst, Denver ARTCC's last reported radar contact with the airplane was at 4,500 feet msl, 7 miles north, and 5 miles west of the Dighton, Kansas Airport. At 2032 cst, Denver ARTCC contacted the Lane County, Kansas, Sheriff's Office, requesting assistance 'in locating a plane that disappeared from radar.' They were informed that they (Denver ARTCC) heard someone say, 'We're going down.' At 2058 cst, the airplane was located by Lane County Sheriff's deputies. Near the time of the accident, weather reporting stations within 60 miles of the accident site were reporting overcast ceiling, visibility from 1/2 to 3 miles with light rain, and temperatures and dew points at 32 degrees F. An examination of the wreckage revealed no anomalies.
Probable cause
the inadvertent stall. Factors relating to this accident were the pilot's inadvertent flight into known adverse weather conditions, the icing conditions, and improper in-flight planning by the pilot.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI00FA090
- Event ID
- 20001212X20590
- Case number
- CHI00FA090
- 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 2000-03-18.
- API snapshot SHA-256: d733b1d72f8ca67fb39205bff4cf41b6b57292cfb4c5e9f25890e71b0ace431a; retrieved 2026-09-20T21:24:13.173Z.