WPR09FA428 · Piper PA-22-150
Piper PA-22-150 · Accident: VFR encounter with IMC en route
From George Felt Airport (5S1) to Grants Pass Airport (3S8)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR09FA428
- 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
- 2 · 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
Piper PA-22-150
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-22
- 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
- N2967P
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From George Felt Airport (5S1), Roseburg, ORTo Grants Pass Airport (3S8), Grants Pass, 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
- 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
- VFR encounter with IMC
- 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 › Action/decision
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The non-instrument-rated and non-certificated pilot was flying along a 49-mile route, which paralleled a major interstate highway. Mountainous terrain was located within a few miles of the highway, and, in the accident site area, mountains rose to 3,300 feet mean sea level (msl). While flying about 0.7 miles west of the highway, the pilot collided with a mountain at 2,400 feet msl. Near the departure airport, about 23 miles northwest of the accident site, the base of the overcast ceiling was between 2,000 and 2,200 feet msl. Witnesses located about 1 mile north of the crash site reported that the mountaintop south of their position was not visible at the time of the accident due to the cloud coverage. The wreckage and ground scar signatures were consistent with a level-flight impact into the terrain. Thus, it is likely that the pilot, while attempting to fly just below the clouds, encountered instrument meteorological conditions and lost visual reference to the mountainous terrain.
Probable cause
The non-instrument-rated and non-certificated pilot’s decision to continue visual flight into instrument meteorological conditions in mountainous terrain, which resulted in controlled flight into terrain.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR09FA428
- Event ID
- 20090830X41910
- Case number
- WPR09FA428
- 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: 8b31de64c6fb9d8d219de34c6603cb18d2e3c2bc4130145776b5bfd8bb995b9a; retrieved 2026-09-13T20:27:05.619Z.