ANC00LA041 · Piper PA-28
Piper PA-28 · Accident: in flight encounter with weather en route
From Naknek Airport (5NK) to Bethel Airport (PABE)
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC00LA041
- 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
- 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
- N6119W
- Operator
- Mark Mcgee
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Naknek Airport (5NK), Naknek, AKTo Bethel Airport (PABE), Bethel, AK
- 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
- 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 › Altitude, not maintained
- Pilot in command › Weather evaluation, inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The first pilot, a commercial certificated pilot and a flight instructor, and the second pilot, a private pilot, were ferrying the airplane cross-country to obtain an annual inspection. The airplane was owned and being flown by the second pilot who occupied the left seat. The second pilot's medical certificate was expired. The first pilot, occupying the right seat, said he was the pilot-in-command, but the second pilot was at the flight controls at the time of the crash. The flight proceeded toward a small range of mountains, but the tops of the ridges were obscured by clouds. The first pilot said overcast sky conditions varied between 1,400 to 1,600 feet above the ground, and he estimated the visibility below the overcast as 20 miles. As the flight approached the mountains, the pilot turned northward, but found no access across the mountains. He turned around and began to proceed to the departure airport. While in cruise flight at 500 feet above the ground, the first pilot said the horizon became indistinguishable from the snow-covered mountains, and the snow-covered ground. The first pilot said that neither he or the second pilot realized the airplane was slowly descending until it collided with the surface of a snow-covered lake.
Probable cause
The first pilot's (pilot-in-command) inadequate evaluation of the weather, and failure to maintain an adequate altitude above the ground. Factors in the accident were low ceilings, and snow-covered terrain.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC00LA041
- Event ID
- 20001212X20746
- Case number
- ANC00LA041
- 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: 3bfeab803c398eb7ed2b2d77bff136ce376c1ba67d34ee921d9407bb419b096f; retrieved 2026-09-21T20:15:47.246Z.