DEN01FA021 · Piper PA-24-250
Piper PA-24-250 · Accident: in flight encounter with weather en route
From Provo Municipal Airport (PVU) to Falcon Field (FFZ)
Event
- NTSB case
- DEN01FA021
- 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
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
Piper PA-24-250
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-24
- 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
- N8245P
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Provo Municipal Airport (PVU), Provo, UTTo Falcon Field (FFZ), Mesa, AZ
- 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
- 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
- Visual flight rules (VFR) flight into instrument meteorological conditions (IMC)
- 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 › Aircraft control, not maintained
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The non-instrument rated private pilot did not obtain a weather briefing nor file a flight plan for the cross country flight. There were a snow advisory and an AIRMET in effect for low ceilings and snow along the airplane's route of flight. There were no known radio communications with the pilot. Radar data disclosed and tracked a VFR target in the vicinity of the accident location, descending from 14,900 feet msl to 9,800 feet. The target then reversed course, and then squawked 7700 (emergency) before disappearing. The airplane collided with mountainous terrain at 8,540 feet. Examination of the airplane revealed that it impacted the ground in a steep nose down attitude.
Probable cause
the pilot's failure to maintain aircraft control while maneuvering. Contributing factors were the pilot's failure to obtain a preflight weather briefing, his VFR flight into IMC, lack of instrument certification, spatial disorientation, low ceiling, and snow.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DEN01FA021
- Event ID
- 20010110X00072
- Case number
- DEN01FA021
- 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: b3eb1dfa1b6820e72aaa01c5c018d4f02ff8b7849ddb38a03b38bf71cae5a683; retrieved 2026-09-20T20:44:04.321Z.