CEN12WA275 · Piper PA42 UNDESIGNAT
Piper PA42 UNDESIGNAT · Accident
From Grand Case-l'Espérance Airport (TFFG) to TFFD · Fort de France
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN12WA275
- 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
- Unknown · led by another country; figures from NTSB notifications
- API-reported fatalities
- 4 · 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
- Not recorded
Piper PA42 UNDESIGNAT
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA42
- 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
- F-GXES
- Operator
- Transports Aeriens Intercaraibes
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Grand Case-l'Espérance Airport (TFFG), Grand CaseTo TFFD · Fort de France
- 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
- Non-U.S., Non-Commercial
- 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
- Not recorded
- 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
- Not recorded
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Destroyed
Cause areas
No findings designated as a cause are recorded in the NTSB data yet.
Not plotted · Location withheld: coordinates are missing, conflicting, invalid, or have no accepted acquisition method. No substitute location has been invented.
NTSB narrative
On May 5, 2012, at 0640 UTC, a Piper PA42 Cheyenne III, French registration F-GXES, was destroyed when it crashed about four minutes after takeoff into the Atlantic Ocean, three miles from Grand Case, St. Maarten. The pilot and three passengers on board were fatally injured. Visual meteorological conditions prevailed at the time of the accident. The foreign, non-scheduled cross-country flight was en route to Fort de France, Martinique.
Witnesses saw the airplane explode and crash into the sea.
This investigation is under the jurisdiction of the government of France. This report is for informational purposes only and contains information released by, or obtained from the French BEA. Any further information regarding the investigation can be obtained from the French BEA at:
Bureau d’Enquetes et d’Analyses Zone Sud – Batiment 153 200 rue de Paris Aeroport du Borget 93352 Le Bourget Cedex France Telephone: +33 1 49 92 72 00 Facsimile: +33 1 49 92 72 03 E-mail: per@bea-fr.org
Verbatim NTSB factual narrative from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN12WA275
- Event ID
- 20120507X00611
- Case number
- CEN12WA275
- 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.
- No bulk values were replaced by the NTSB case API.
- The date is the local date, which is the same as the UTC date the NTSB stores.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 5ec59ec3ff6ea79d6aed53c82c4e67a1353352f48dc0957baef8662138155eeb; retrieved 2026-09-13T22:20:47.104Z.