CEN14LA074 · Piper PA 28-181
Piper PA 28-181 · Accident: structural icing en route
From Falls International Airport (KINL) to Bottineau Municipal Airport (D09)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN14LA074
- 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
- Instrument 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
- N6780F
- Operator
- Scheflo Steven M
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Falls International Airport (KINL), Inter. Falls, MNTo Bottineau Municipal Airport (D09), Bottineau, ND
- 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
- 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
- Structural icing
- 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
- Environmental issues › Conditions/weather/phenomena
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The noninstrument-rated private pilot obtained a computerized weather briefing about 9 hours before he departed on a night cross-country flight. At that time, neither ice nor low visibility conditions were forecast along his intended flight route. The pilot did not obtain any additional weather information before takeoff or while en route. Weather conditions at the time of departure were marginal visual meteorological conditions, and instrument meteorological conditions (IMC) were forecast along the route of flight. The weather conditions were also conducive to the accumulation of structural icing. The pilot reported that, about 2 hours into the flight, the airplane entered IMC. He stated that he looked out at the wing and saw that "frost" had started to build up. The airplane was unable to maintain altitude, so the pilot added power and focused on maintaining level flight at a safe airspeed as the airplane continued to descend until it impacted trees and the ground. The airplane came to rest on its left side in an ice-covered field and sustained substantial damage to both wings, all three landing gear, and the right horizontal stabilizer.
Probable cause
The noninstrument-rated pilot’s failure to obtain weather briefings immediately before and during the flight and his continued flight into icing conditions, which resulted in the airplane’s loss of performance and the subsequent controlled descent into trees and terrain.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN14LA074
- Event ID
- 20131203X82831
- Case number
- CEN14LA074
- 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. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2013-12-01.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 4a92a03f96b1a7980d8a96419dfd4b2d53375f306d710b174d36b298fe5f87ec; retrieved 2026-09-15T23:09:31.783Z.