WPR26FA130 · Beech A36
Beech A36 · Accident en route
From Monterey Regional Airport (MRY) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR26FA130
- 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
- Ongoing
- 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
- Visual Meteorological Cond
Beech A36
- Aircraft type
- Beechcraft 36
- 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
- N2882W
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Monterey Regional Airport (MRY), Monterey, CATo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 53 years (built 1973)
- 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
- Unknown or undetermined
- 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
No findings designated as a cause are recorded in the NTSB data yet.
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
On March 22, 2026, at 1716 Pacific daylight time, a Beech A36, N2882W, was substantially damaged when it was involved in an accident near Olympic Valley, California. The pilot was fatally injured. The airplane was operated as a Title14 Code of Federal Regulations Part 91 personal cross-country flight. According to the ADS-B data provided by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the airplane departed Monterey Regional Airport (MRY), Monterey, California, at 1411 and was destined for the Truckee-Tahoe Airport (TRK), Truckee, California. Recorded communication indicated that when the airplane was about 12 miles southwest of the accident site, the pilot contacted the TRK air traffic control tower local controller (LC) that he was inbound for landing. The pilot subsequently reported a turbocharger problem, and he didn’t think he would make it to the airport. Recorded ADS-B data ended at an altitude of about 7,382 ft, about 13 miles southwest of TRK and no further radio transmissions were heard from the pilot. An Apple iPhone crash detection alert was received by local law enforcement in the accident area. The accident site was subsequently located by a California Highway Patrol helicopter crew, in the Granite Chief Wilderness area along the shoreline of a lake about 1-1/2 miles northeast of the last recorded ADS-B data point. Examination of the accident site revealed that the airplane came to rest in a nose down attitude partially submerged near the shore in a subalpine lake in an area known as the Five Lakes at an altitude of 7,500 ft mean sea level (msl) on a magnetic heading of 225°. The first identified point of contact (FIPC) was the top of a pine tree about 150 ft southwest of the main wreckage. About 75 ft from the FIPC was the right wing, which had struck a tree near the base and separated from the airplane. There was a postcrash fire centralized at the right wing and tree. The engine, including the propeller assembly, separated from the airplane and was mostly submerged in the lake. All major structural components of the airplane were located at the accident site. The airplane was recovered to a secure facility for further examination.
Verbatim NTSB factual narrative from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR26FA130
- Event ID
- 20260323202675
- Case number
- WPR26FA130
- 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 2026-03-23.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 47f67c9492168a0dba98d806d37faf23097a4caa92007e9f44e74fd3bc15fc22; retrieved 2026-09-15T09:14:29.544Z.