SEA08LA095 · Piper PA-28-181
Rocky Mountain College Piper PA-28-181 · Accident: controlled flight into terrain/object (CFIT) en route
From Billings Logan International Airport (BIL) to Powell Municipal Airport (POY)
Event
- NTSB case
- SEA08LA095
- 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
- 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-28-181
- 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
- N432RM
- Operator
- Rocky Mountain College
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Billings Logan International Airport (BIL), Billings, MTTo Powell Municipal Airport (POY), Powell, WY
- 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
- 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
- Controlled flight into terrain/object (CFIT)
- 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 › Psychological
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot departed on a night, solo cross-country flight to fulfill a training requirement for his commercial pilot certificate. Although the pilot was aware that the flight was to be flown using dead reckoning and pilotage, he did not verify the ground checkpoints during the flight, which resulted in his loss of situational awareness. Following departure, the air traffic controller had the pilot fly southeast of the airport. After the pilot cleared the airspace, in an action inconsistent with established visual flight rules (VFR) procedures set by his school, the pilot incorrectly entered a true course rather than a magnetic course into the global positioning system (GPS) onboard the airplane. In the process of programming the GPS unit, he used a GPS course entry procedure that was only to be used during instrument flight procedures rather than VFR flight navigation. The pilot then activated the autopilot to fly the entered course. During the flight, the airplane entered instrument flight rules conditions and the pilot disconnected the autopilot. The pilot then received a warning on the GPS that the airplane was close to terrain. He began a left turn to return to visual flight rules. During the turn, the airplane impacted the terrain. The pilot did not report any mechanical or navigational anomalies with the airplane and none were identified during the postaccident examination of the wreckage and instrumentation.
Probable cause
The pilot failed to maintain situational awareness during the flight. Contributing to the accident were the dark night, the pilot's failure to follow approved navigational procedures for the flight, and the pilot's over reliance on the avionics in the airplane.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record SEA08LA095
- Event ID
- 20080331X00400
- Case number
- SEA08LA095
- 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: local date, investigation status, coordinates. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2008-03-26.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 9f74518ed194f953335392edcb62f8acf353f22345ec67f5a2b644e3415fbffe; retrieved 2026-09-15T09:28:29.094Z.