MIA01FA071 · Mooney M20R
Mooney M20R · Accident: loss of control in flight en route
From Savannah Hilton Head International Airport (SAV) to Flying W Airport (N14)
Event
- NTSB case
- MIA01FA071
- 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
- Unknown
- 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
Mooney M20R
- Aircraft type
- Mooney M20
- 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
- N88FJ
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Savannah Hilton Head International Airport (SAV), Savannah, GATo Flying W Airport (N14), Lumberton, NJ
- 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
- Wire, transmission
- 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
- Pilot in command › Spatial disorientation
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The instrument-rated pilot obtained a weather brief which indicated instrument meteorological flight conditions, with cloud bases near 600 feet, and tops above 10,000 feet. Flight visibility was 0 miles in the clouds, and near 4 miles in mist below the lowest cloud base. An AIRMET for IFR conditions had been in effect for the area of the accident site. The pilot departed Savannah, Georgia during daylight hours, and about 8 minutes into the flight after he had acknowledged an Air Traffic Controller's instruction to fly heading of 080 degrees, and to maintain an altitude of 3,000 feet, the airplane was observed to turn to the left, followed by in a descending turn to the right. The airplane was last observed at 1318:38, at an altitude of 1,700 feet. It collided with high voltage utility wires, and impacted the ground spreading burning debris over a large area. A witness who was outside her house on her porch said she saw the accident airplane in a descent with one wing low as if in a turn, and it disappeared behind trees, exploding on impact. She stated that the engine sounded as if it was operating normally prior to the impact. Postcrash examination of the aircraft did not reveal any evidence of any preaccident failure or malfunction to the airframe, the flight controls, or the engine.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain control due to spatial disorientation.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record MIA01FA071
- Event ID
- 20010209X00432
- Case number
- MIA01FA071
- 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, coordinates. 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: 65b555337f94e8b77a5d2ab6579b0331dcaf5a18e23908f2d6922124f7e316dd; retrieved 2026-09-20T20:40:29.486Z.