NYC03FA061 · Piper PA-32-300
Piper PA-32-300 · Accident: in flight encounter with weather en route
From Walter J. Koladza Airport (GBR) to Dillant Hopkins Airport (EEN)
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC03FA061
- 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
- 4 · 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-32-300
- 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
- N4072R
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Walter J. Koladza Airport (GBR), Great Barington, MATo Dillant Hopkins Airport (EEN), Keene, NH
- 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 › Planning/decision, improper
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, his wife, and five children, were returning to Keene, New Hampshire (EEN), after a trip to Florida. During a stop in North Carolina, the pilot's wife called her brother to inform him that they were "unsure" of the weather at Keene and would be flying to Utica or Hamilton, New York, to stay with him. While en route the pilot's wife informed her brother that the weather at Keene was clearer then they expected, and they wanted to get the children home in time for school the next day. About 1 hour later, the pilot informed air traffic control that he did not like the weather at his destination, canceled his IFR clearance, and requested VFR advisories to an airport in Westfield, Massachusetts. The airplane landed at an airport in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, about 1900. The airplane departed from runway 29, about 2003. After takeoff, the airplane made a climbing right turn onto a northeast heading. The airplane continued on east-northeast heading and impacted terrain about 5 minutes after takeoff. The airplane was located at an elevation of about 1,920 feet msl, about 7.5 miles east of the departure airport. Examination of the wreckage did not reveal any pre-impact malfunctions. An AIRMET for IFR conditions was valid for accident site at the time of the accident. One of the children remembered the airplane "landing somewhere dark" and the pilot not being able to locate a telephone. The weather reported about the time of the accident, at an airport with an elevation of 1,193 feet, located about 15 miles north of the accident site, included a visibility of 8 miles, few clouds at 900 feet, a broken ceiling at 1,300 feet and overcast at 1,800 feet. The weather reported at EEN, which was located about 70 miles northeast of the accident site, with an elevation of about 488 feet, at 1855, included: a visibility of 1/2 statute miles; and an overcast ceiling of 100 feet. At 1955, the visibility reported at EEN increased to 3/4 statute miles; however, the ceiling remained 100 feet overcast. Astronomical data for the accident site area revealed that sunset occurred at 1744, and the end of civil twilight occurred at 1812.
Probable cause
The pilot's improper decision to attempt a visual flight rules (VFR) flight in marginal VFR weather conditions over mountainous terrain, which resulted in an in-flight collision with trees. Factors in this accident were clouds and night light conditions.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC03FA061
- Event ID
- 20030310X00305
- Case number
- NYC03FA061
- 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 2003-03-03.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 35451ef07aa210170decc0e5fd8756089535ef842fc96d2d3ebd784599b787c1; retrieved 2026-09-20T19:25:27.192Z.