Cape Air Flight 36
Cessna 402C · Accident: in flight encounter with weather en route
From Eugenio Maria De Hostos Airport (TJMZ) to Luis Munoz Marin International Airport (TJSJ)
Event
- NTSB case
- MIA06LA071
- 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
- 0 · 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
- Charter & commuter
- 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
Cessna 402C
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 402
- 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
- N223PB
- Operator
- Cape Air
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Eugenio Maria De Hostos Airport (TJMZ), Mayaguez, PRTo Luis Munoz Marin International Airport (TJSJ), San Juan, PR
- 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 135: Air Taxi & Commuter
- 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
- None
Cause areas
- Pilot in command › Flight into known adverse weather, continued
- Pilot in command › Weather radar, not used
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
While flying at 5,000 feet in a broken layer with some light rain and turbulence with the autopilot on, the pilot later reported, encountering severe turbulence, which lasted for 1 second. Several passengers hit their heads on the ceiling as a result. She reported avoiding all clouds after that, requested medical assistance, and landed uneventfully. One passenger who was injured reported that the pilot advised them that the flight would be "bumpy" and they needed to keep their seatbelts fastened, which she complied with. At the time of the event she could hear "...something like small pebbles dropping onto the plane. There was mist on the windshield that streamed from the bottom/middle of the windshield to the top." She further stated that after assessing herself, "maybe a minute or two, the pilot turned on a screen that had been blank up to that point." She also reported seeing "...green blobs that came on and off. It reminded me of the radar screen that I have seen on TV." Weather radar images indicate the airplane was near VIP Level 1 to Level 4 radar returns at the time of the occurrence.
Probable cause
The failure of the pilot to use on-board weather radar equipment for weather avoidance and the pilot's continued operation into known adverse weather conditions, resulting in injury to passengers.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record MIA06LA071
- Event ID
- 20060331X00374
- Case number
- MIA06LA071
- Dataset
- historical-pre2008
- Source SHA-256
- 89e2df6d848e7ab3b42e7d7c7a03ff403303057a26ca04c95b3ea67201c3ce74
Source notes (5)
- 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, damage. 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: d0f9d89c10f570695e2aea20ee31dbc98b8e3efb8b9c016814e5546893156a87; retrieved 2026-09-18T14:54:19.304Z.
- The NTSB's operator name is blank for N223PB; the operator shown is the name the NTSB records it doing business as.