SEA04FA031 · Piper PA-44-180
Auburn Flight Service Piper PA-44-180 · Accident: in flight encounter with weather en route
From Oakland San Francisco Bay Airport (OAK) to Southwest Oregon Regional Airport (OTH)
Event
- NTSB case
- SEA04FA031
- 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-44-180
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-44
- 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
- N53505
- Operator
- Auburn Flight Service
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Oakland San Francisco Bay Airport (OAK), Oakland, CATo Southwest Oregon Regional Airport (OTH), North Bend, OR
- 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
- Tree(s)
- 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
- Copilot/second pilot › Flight into known adverse weather, inadvertent
- Fuel system, carburetor › Ice
- Induction air control, air filter/screen › Blocked(partial)
- Pilot in command › Flight into known adverse weather, inadvertent
- Ram/induction air › Ice
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The two commercially certificated flying pilots, accompanied by an airline transport rated pilot and a second passenger, departed Oakland, California, en route to North Bend, Oregon. A weather briefing had been obtained indicating an AIRMET for rime icing from the freezing level to 18,000 feet. The aircraft departed late in the afternoon, climbed to 12,000 feet and occasionally climbed to 13,000 feet for short durations in order to remain VMC above a cloud layer. Night environmental conditions existed when both engines began losing power and the copilot radioed Seattle Center that the aircraft had encountered "way too much induction ice to the engines," declaring an emergency. The pilot-in-command reported the outside air temperature at the power loss was about -20 degrees Celsius and he immediately applied full carburetor heat and began trouble shooting the problem while descending back toward a nearby airport. Application of carburetor heat bypassed the ice blocked induction air filters allowing unfiltered, warmed air to flow directly to the carburetors. Remedial action by the crew failed to regain full power and the aircraft broke out of the cloud bases in heavy snow too far down the runway to effect a landing. The pilot then began a turn to line up and land on the adjacent highway just east of the runway during which the aircraft's right wing struck several trees and the aircraft impacted near the west edge of the highway a short distance beyond.
Probable cause
Both the pilot-in-command and the co-pilot allowing the aircraft to enter into an area of adverse weather (icing conditions at low [-20 degrees C] temperatures) resulting in sequential induction icing, induction filter blockage, carburetor icing and the subsequent partial loss of power in both engines followed by tree impact and collision with terrain during an emergency descent/approach. Contributing factors were icing conditions, low temperatures, night conditions and trees.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record SEA04FA031
- Event ID
- 20040108X00041
- Case number
- SEA04FA031
- 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 2004-01-02.
- API snapshot SHA-256: b028453759ff20341598a150bdbb863051dce6760e954464d8c39fa20b80fde2; retrieved 2026-09-20T18:39:40.193Z.