ERA10IA254 · Piper PA 46-350P
T & K Piper PA 46-350P · Incident: part(s) separation from aircraft en route
From Southern Illinois Airport (MDH) to Smith Reynolds Airport (INT)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA10IA254
- 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
- Incident
- 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 46-350P
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-46
- 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
- N46PT
- Operator
- T & K
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Southern Illinois Airport (MDH), Carbondale, ILTo Smith Reynolds Airport (INT), Winston-Salem, NC
- 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
- Part(s) separation from aircraft
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Minor
Cause areas
- Aircraft › Aircraft structures
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
While flying at 15,000 feet in the pressurized airplane, the pilot's side window blew out. The pilot successfully diverted to a nearby airport and landed uneventfully after performing an instrument approach in instrument meteorological conditions. Postincident examination of the window revealed that the primary fracture, which ultimately resulted in the in-flight loss of the window, exhibited signatures of preexisting cracking. The airframe manufacturer had previously issued a service bulletin that detailed inspections of the window for cracking, and while the cracking observed on the incident window occurred outside of the area called out in the service bulletin, review of the incident airplane's maintenance records showed no evidence that any portion of the service bulletin had ever been complied with.
Probable cause
A failure of the pilot's side window due to undetected cracking around the lower aft portion of the storm window cutout.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA10IA254
- Event ID
- 20100507X11752
- Case number
- ERA10IA254
- 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: 2bbb23bae00c207e8c951d6d50ed434ccf6db748d018f22fa672b4c6cdbc4ba3; retrieved 2026-09-15T14:00:22.475Z.