SEA08LA072 · Wooters Lancair ES
Wooters Lancair ES · Accident during an uncontrolled descent
From Salem-Willamette Valley Airport/McNary Field (KSLE) to Crater Lake-Klamath Regional Airport (KLMT)
Event
- NTSB case
- SEA08LA072
- 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
- 3 · 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
Wooters Lancair ES
- Aircraft type
- Wooters LANCAIR ES
- 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
- N329BW
- Operator
- Louis Lamb
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Salem-Willamette Valley Airport/McNary Field (KSLE), Salem, ORTo Crater Lake-Klamath Regional Airport (KLMT), Klamath Falls, 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
- Uncontrolled descent
- Defining eventThe 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
- Miscellaneous/other
- 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
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The non-instrument rated, private pilot filed an instrument flight plan for a cross-country flight, in an airplane not equipped for in-flight icing encounters. The pilot was seated in the right seat, and the airplane's owner, also a non-instrument rated private pilot, was seated in the left seat. Family members indicated that the pilot and the owner/pilot flew together often, and the right seat pilot would provide radio and navigation assistance to the owner/pilot. Based on the available evidence, investigators were unable to determine who was flying the airplane at the time of the accident. The airplane was cleared to climb to 13,000 feet, and approximately 8 minutes after departure, declared an emergency and was lost from radar. Data obtained from instrumentation on board the airplane indicated that after attaining approximately 10,400 feet, the airplane entered a rapid descent. Weather information at the time of the accident showed that icing conditions were forecast along the route of flight. Records show multiple weather information requests from the right seat pilot's computer log-on information to a digital weather service provider the night prior to the accident, and the left seat owner/pilot received a weather briefing via telephone the night prior to the accident. All briefings indicated that visual flight rules to marginal visual flight rules conditions were forecast, and there were airman's meteorological information (AIRMETs) advisories for mountain obscuration, icing, and turbulence.
Probable cause
The pilot-in-command's failure to maintain aircraft control while in cruise flight. Contributing to the accident were inadequate planning/decision, icing conditions, and continued flight into known icing conditions.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record SEA08LA072
- Event ID
- 20080212X00177
- Case number
- SEA08LA072
- Dataset
- full-current
- Source SHA-256
- 5cf380f0061817c0331a6b2d8cc7e0ee3a79bea469a1001dc5c10e56f35f5ab3
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: 5e694095f98eff82ae47351b2c9731d0b90b1ffc775050e32db984385d54052d; retrieved 2026-09-13T18:55:43.933Z.