WPR15FA135 · Piper PA32R - 301
Piper PA32R - 301 · Accident: VFR encounter with IMC en route
From Great Falls International Airport (GTF) to Scottsdale Airport (SDL)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR15FA135
- 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
Piper PA32R - 301
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA32
- 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
- C-GAUS
- Operator
- David Charron
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Great Falls International Airport (GTF), Great Falls, MTTo Scottsdale Airport (SDL), Scottsdale, AZ
- Aircraft age
- About 14 years (built 2001)
- 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 · change of cruise level
- 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
- Aircraft › Aircraft oper/perf/capability
- Environmental issues › Conditions/weather/phenomena
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The instrument-rated private pilot received an official weather briefing before beginning the visual flight rules (VFR) cross-county flight over mountainous terrain. The briefing included information about turbulence, icing, and mountain obscuration along the proposed route of flight, and the briefer stated that VFR flight was not recommended in areas of higher terrain with mountain obscuration. However, the pilot elected to depart on the flight. The passenger reported that during the flight, the weather started closing in, and they were soon in the clouds. The pilot was receiving VFR flight following service, and reported to the controller that he was turning around; soon after communication was lost.
Review of radar data revealed that, over the last 4 minutes of the flight, the airplane made multiple turns while ascending to 10,125 ft msl over mountainous terrain with peaks reaching 9,400 ft in height; it then headed southbound and descended to an altitude of 9,300 ft msl before dropping off radar. The accident site was located in heavily wooded and snow-covered terrain at an elevation of 8,350 ft. Damage to the airplane and to the trees at the accident site was consistent with controlled flight into terrain with the engine operating at a high power setting.
Examination of the pilot's logbook indicated that an instrument check ride was accomplished in December 2008, about 6 years 3 months before the accident and that the pilot had not logged any flight experience between December 2008 and October 2014, about 6 months before the accident. According to the logbook, the pilot was not current to act as pilot-in-command under instrument flight rules and likely was not proficient in instrument flight.
A weather model simulation revealed that the airplane likely encountered rapid horizontal wind speed changes along with downdrafts during the last 4 minutes of the flight. These downdrafts, which were likely encountered while the airplane was in clouds, would have increased the pilot's difficulty of maintaining level flight. If the pilot had been instrument current, he would likely have been better prepared to cope with the weather conditions encountered, including the mountain obscuration and the downdrafts.
Probable cause
The pilot's decision to depart on and to continue a visual flight rules flight over mountainous terrain into instrument meteorological conditions, which resulted in controlled flight into terrain. Contributing to the accident was the pilot's lack of recent instrument flight experience, which exacerbated his difficulty in maintaining control of the airplane while encountering downdrafts and mountain obscuration conditions.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR15FA135
- Event ID
- 20150326X93558
- Case number
- WPR15FA135
- 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: 7448d5fee5e1c25ed6fb8a08a2e2398b273e2a6f884b71f4fb912b3ab9f60dcb; retrieved 2026-09-14T17:33:40.705Z.