NYC01FA128 · Piper PA-28-161
Piper PA-28-161 · Accident: loss of control in flight while maneuvering
From Beverly Regional Airport (BVY) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC01FA128
- 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
- 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
Piper PA-28-161
- 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
- N8365M
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Beverly Regional Airport (BVY), Beverly, MATo not recorded
- 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
- Maneuvering
- 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
- 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 from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot and two passengers departed on a night VFR flight. Weather at the time was approximately 100 foot overcast and 2 1/2 miles in mist. When the airplane was approximately 100 feet agl, the landing light went out, and the airplane entered the overcast. The airplane came out of the overcast in about a 15-degree nose low attitude, and then climbed back into the clouds. The airplane crashed shortly afterwards and a post-crash fire erupted. The airplane impacted the ground approximately 70-degrees nose low. Examination of the wreckage revealed no preimpact failures with the airplane, or any of its systems. There was no record of the pilot receiving a weather briefing on the night of the accident. The pilot had approximately 1,800 of total flight experience with approximately 13 hours being in the previous 30 days. The pilot's expired FAA medical certificate restricted him from night flight because of defective color vision. There was no record of the pilot obtaining a weather briefing prior to the flight.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain aircraft control. Factors in the accident were the dark night, low ceiling, reduced visibility, and the pilot's decision to attempt a visual flight rules flight in marginal weather conditions.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC01FA128
- Event ID
- 20010529X01023
- Case number
- NYC01FA128
- 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, coordinates. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2001-05-22.
- API snapshot SHA-256: f8276f6f4ae2e8e202078679daca7be42822239810bf9f72de6c5f2574c479b2; retrieved 2026-09-20T20:32:31.777Z.