CHI02FA034 · Piper PA-32R-301
Piper PA-32R-301 · Accident: loss of control in flight en route
From Rush County Airport (K94) to Dodge City Regional Airport (DDC)
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI02FA034
- 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
- 1 · 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-32R-301
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-32
- 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
- N9224X
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Rush County Airport (K94), La Crosse, KSTo Dodge City Regional Airport (DDC), Dodge City, 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
- 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 › Flight into known adverse weather, inadvertent
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
At 1809, the pilot received a weather briefing from Wichita Flight Service for a flight from LaCrosse, Kansas, to Dodge City, Kansas (DDC). The controller told the pilot that VFR flight was not recommended and to expect instrument conditions at DDC. At approximately 1830, a witness observed the airplane fly over his house heading southwest. The witness said the airplane turned south and went into a fog bank. The witness then said the airplane came out of the fog bank heading west and diving. The airplane hit the ground and exploded. The witness said the airplane's lights were on and the engine was running. An examination of the airplane revealed no pre-impact anomalies. At 1856, the National Weather Service at DDC, 12 miles southwest of the accident site, reported winds 150 degrees at 13 knots, ceilings of 600 feet broken, 1,000 feet overcast, 5 miles visibility with mist, temperature 54 degrees Fahrenheit (F), dew point 53 degrees F, and altimeter 30.27 inches of Mercury. The pilot held a third class medical certificate dated December 15, 1999. The certificate contained limitations stating, "Not valid for night flying or by color signal control". The lighting conditions at the time of the accident was dark night.
Probable cause
the pilot's failure to maintain aircraft control and his inadvertent flight into known adverse weather conditions. Factors relating to this accident were the pilot's limited ability to see at night, spatial disorientation, the dark night, and the fog.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI02FA034
- Event ID
- 20011123X02290
- Case number
- CHI02FA034
- 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 2001-11-17.
- API snapshot SHA-256: e3cb93d1448eb9a04e0b09472005ae1ce5c526aeb2f1aed67b8c209a5d5057d4; retrieved 2026-09-20T20:17:25.391Z.