LAX07FA061 · Piper PA-28-140
Piper PA-28-140 · Accident: in flight encounter with weather en route
From Yerington Municipal Airport (O43) to Lone Pine/Death Valley Airport (O26)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX07FA061
- 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
- Visual Meteorological Cond
Piper PA-28-140
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-28
- 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
- N8001H
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Yerington Municipal Airport (O43), Yerington, NVTo Lone Pine/Death Valley Airport (O26), Lone Pine, CA
- 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
- Visual flight rules (VFR) flight into instrument meteorological conditions (IMC)
- 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 › Spatial disorientation
- Pilot in command › VFR flight into imc, attempted
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
There were no known witnesses to the accident. The non-instrument rated pilot was on a cross-country flight over mountainous terrain. There was an Airmen's Meteorological Information (AIRMET) advisory for mountain obscuration by clouds, precipitation, mist, and fog that included the area along the route of flight. A radar target that transited the expected flight path from the departure point at the time of the airplane's flight displayed climbs and descents consistent with attempts to avoid clouds. The airplane collided with the mountainous terrain in an extreme nose down attitude at high velocity. Investigators discovered no anomalies with the airframe or engine that would have precluded normal operation.
Probable cause
The pilot's attempted VFR flight into instrument meteorological conditions and subsequent failure to maintain aircraft control due to spatial disorientation. Contributing to the accident was mountain obscuration.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX07FA061
- Event ID
- 20070111X00041
- Case number
- LAX07FA061
- 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: 1277ab68b87bc6d3306bb774346eec7b16c2f8a0300199e816345afeda6adbf1; retrieved 2026-09-20T16:56:52.689Z.