MIA07LA084 · Piper PA-23-250
Piper PA-23-250 · Accident: in flight encounter with weather en route
From Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport (KFXE) to Andros Town Airport (MYAF)
Narrative check · The NTSB narrative appears to contradict this record's location. Values are shown as recorded, not corrected; compare with the narrative.
Event
- NTSB case
- MIA07LA084
- 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
- 5 · 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-23-250
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-23
- 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
- N4TR
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport (KFXE), Fort Lauderdale, FLTo Andros Town Airport (MYAF), Andros Island
- 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 · climb to 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
- Destroyed
Cause areas
- Pilot in command › Flight into known adverse weather, continued
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The non-instrument rated pilot received a weather briefing 30-minutes prior to departure, in which he was informed that the remains of a low pressure system was in the area of the Northern Bahamas and that some showers associated with the remains were present along the coast of Florida. The weather was moving to the south and that locally there were some heavy weather returns, generally 10 miles or less. The flight departed and the pilot was instructed to maintain visual flight rules conditions. When cleared to climb to his cruising altitude the pilot stated that he was going to stay around 2,500 feet for he had some weather in front of him. The pilot was told to contact another controller and when contact was made, the pilot reported he was at 4,000 feet, climbing to his cruise altitude. No further transmissions were received from the pilot and shortly thereafter the flight was lost from radar contact. Air traffic control radar data overlaid with weather radar data showed the flight entered a line of weather containing Video Integrator Processor Level 4 thunderstorms just prior to being lost from radar. A debris field was located on the ocean by a Coast Guard helicopter about 95 minutes after the accident. The field contained aircraft and human remains and a jacket being carried by one of the airplanes occupants was recovered.
Probable cause
The pilot's continued visual flight rules flight into known adverse weather conditions, resulting in an in-flight loss of aircraft control. Contributing to the accident were thunderstorms.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record MIA07LA084
- Event ID
- 20070425X00452
- Case number
- MIA07LA084
- 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. 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: 8d1ce869e661763ea16c86c0dd6219361926e2764187a3ff66c83f3411a9608e; retrieved 2026-09-20T16:43:16.011Z.