CHI08LA158 · Maggs Lancair 4P
Maggs Lancair 4P · Accident: aircraft structural failure en route
From Denison Municipal Airport (DNS) to Bowman Field (LOU)
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI08LA158
- 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
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
Maggs Lancair 4P
- Aircraft type
- Maggs LANCAIR 4
- 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
- N241DM
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Denison Municipal Airport (DNS), Denison, IATo Bowman Field (LOU), Louisville, KY
- 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
- Aircraft structural failure
- 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
- Aircraft › Aircraft structures
- Environmental issues › Conditions/weather/phenomena
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
Prior to the instrument flight rules flight, the pilot received an updated weather briefing and was informed of the existence of severe thunderstorm and tornado watches and extensive convective activity along his proposed route of flight. While en route, the pilot was informed by air traffic control of areas of heavy precipitation along his flight path. The pilot continued the flight and encountered an area of extreme precipitation. Communication and radar position information were lost. The airplane's fuselage was found separate from the wings and tail surfaces. The wreckage trail was about 4 miles long, indicating that the airplane experienced an in-flight structural failure before impacting the ground.
Probable cause
The pilot's decision to continue the flight into an area of known thunderstorm activity and the in-flight structural failure of the airplane.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI08LA158
- Event ID
- 20080714X01038
- Case number
- CHI08LA158
- 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. 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: 72e8b11c18304eb368db8eb1edeb91d3cdf2562d287a096b1edee8b92978fea8; retrieved 2026-09-13T19:15:23.102Z.