MIA04FA135 · Cessna 336
Cessna 336 · Accident: loss of control in flight while maneuvering
From Atmore Municipal Airport (0R1) to Magee Municipal Airport (17M)
Event
- NTSB case
- MIA04FA135
- 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
- Visual Meteorological Cond
Cessna 336
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 336
- 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
- N3832U
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Atmore Municipal Airport (0R1), Atmore, ALTo Magee Municipal Airport (17M), Magee, MS
- 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
- 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
- Destroyed
Cause areas
- Pilot in command › Planning/decision, inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The accident airplane crashed while maneuvering to land in the vicinity of the airport, September 15, 2004. On board the airplane was the student pilot/owner, as well as his wife and children. A relative had reported the family as missing on September 24, 2004, and the investigation that followed revealed that the family had last been seen on September 14, 2004, at the Atmore Airport, Atmore, Alabama. The airplane was discovered on October 4 , 2004, by the Mississippi Wing of the Civil Air Patrol, about 2.5 nautical miles from the airport. According to records, the student pilot had accumulated a total of 96.5 flight hours, of which about 43.3 flight hours were in the same make and model airplane. he had also accumulated 3.4 hours of night flight experience, and he had not recorded any flight experience within the previous 90 days. According to information obtained from the accident pilot's flight instructor, his student had last received instruction on September 9, 2003, and at that time he was not given an endorsement to operate the airplane solo. Postcrash examination of the airplane did not reveal any anomalies with its structure, flight controls, or engines.
Probable cause
The student pilot/ airplane owner's lack of training in night operations, which resulted in spatial disorientation, a loss of control, an uncontrolled descent, and an impact with trees.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record MIA04FA135
- Event ID
- 20041008X01609
- Case number
- MIA04FA135
- 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: a423f63846b300b4a7552200f8d9be7e566eeebae10553b4da3518c8df1b15e3; retrieved 2026-09-20T18:20:21.368Z.