2009 Pilatus PC-12 crash in Montana
Eagle Cap Leasing Pilatus PC-12/45 · Unknown
From Oroville Municipal Airport (KOVE) to Bozeman Yellowstone International Airport (KBZN)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR09MA159
- 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
- Event fatalities
- 14 · all aircraft and ground
- Ground fatalities
- Unknown
- Occupants
- Unknown
- Survivors
- 0
- InjuriesFatal: death within 30 days. Serious: over 48 hours in hospital within a week, most broken bones, severe bleeding, nerve or organ damage, or serious burns. Minor: anything less. Glossary
- 0 serious · 0 minor (NTSB)
- 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
Pilatus PC-12/45
- Aircraft type
- Pilatus PC-12
- 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
- N128CM
- Operator
- Eagle Cap Leasing
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Oroville Municipal Airport (KOVE), Oroville, CATo Bozeman Yellowstone International Airport (KBZN), Bozeman, MT
- 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
- Maneuvering
- 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
- Loss of control in flight
- 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
- Aircraft › Fluids/miscellaneous hardware
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
From the Wikipedia article
The Pilatus PC-12 aeroplane accident occurred at a cemetery in the US state of Montana at approximately 14:27 local time (21:27 GMT) on 22 March 2009. At least 14 people, among them 7 children, died when the small aeroplane crashed. "The mishap occurred when the pilot was preparing to land at the Butte airport, in Montana," reported the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA, by its English initials). It was said that the children were returning from an excursion, and the weather conditions were described as cloudy. The crashed aeroplane was a Pilatus PC-12 manufactured in 2001, which normally has capacity for about ten people, although experts indicated that this particular model may have been adapted to accommodate more occupants.
Details of the accident
The aeroplane was flying from Oroville, California to Bozeman, Montana, 85 miles (136 kilometres) south-east of the town of Butte, Montana. However, at one point the pilot decided to "cancel" his flight plan while they were flying in order to head for Butte. According to a witness, the aeroplane crashed in Holy Cross cemetery 500 ft (150m) from Bert Mooney Airport. A shop employee told the BBC that the weather conditions during the accident were cloudy. The fatalities include a great many children who were returning from an excursion. It is believed that no one died on the ground. Onlookers rushed to take photographs of the accident, and one person reported her attempts to help the victims, together with her husband, except that "there was nothing to help with" and that she had seen the aeroplane "just going to the right, diving towards the cemetery". Various photographs showed gigantic flames coming from the cemetery.
Translated into English with AI assistance from the Spanish Wikipedia article “Accidente del avión Pilatus PC-12 en Montana de 2009” (revision 175015434, retrieved 2026-09-19) by its authors, under CC BY-SA 4.0. Extracted as plain text: references, tables, images and some sections are left out; the translation may contain errors, and long articles were cut to their first 700 words. Read the article
NTSB narrative
The Safety Board's full report is available at http://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/reports_aviation.html. The Aircraft Accident Report number is NTSB/AAR-11-05.
On March 22, 2009, about 1432 mountain daylight time, a Pilatus PC-12/45, N128CM, was diverting to Bert Mooney Airport (BTM), Butte, Montana, when it crashed about 2,100 feet west of runway 33 at BTM. The pilot and the 13 airplane passengers were fatally injured, and the airplane was substantially damaged by impact forces and a postcrash fire. The airplane was owned by Eagle Cap Leasing of Enterprise, Oregon, and was operating as a personal flight under the provisions of 14 Code of Federal Regulations Part 91. The flight departed Oroville Municipal Airport, Oroville, California, on an instrument flight rules flight plan with a destination of Gallatin Field, Bozeman, Montana. Visual meteorological conditions prevailed at the time of the accident.
Probable cause
(1) the pilot's failure to ensure that a fuel system icing inhibitor was added to the fuel before the flights on the day of the accident; (2) his failure to take appropriate remedial actions after a low fuel pressure state (resulting from icing within the fuel system) and a lateral fuel imbalance developed, including diverting to a suitable airport before the fuel imbalance became extreme; and (3) a loss of control while the pilot was maneuvering the left wing-heavy airplane near the approach end of the runway.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
Spanish Wikipedia article: Accidente del avión Pilatus PC-12 en Montana de 2009
- Translation
- Into English with AI assistance; names of linked operators and aircraft types from Wikidata. It may contain errors.
- Revision
- 175015434 · 2026-08-25 · retrieved 2026-09-19
- Wikidata
- Q966976
- Licence
- Text CC BY-SA 4.0, by the article's authors; Wikidata CC0; town positions GeoNames (CC BY 4.0)
NTSB record WPR09MA159
- Event ID
- 20090322X90442
- Case number
- WPR09MA159
- Dataset
- full-current
- Source SHA-256
- 5cf380f0061817c0331a6b2d8cc7e0ee3a79bea469a1001dc5c10e56f35f5ab3
Where each value comes from
- Record
- es Wikipedia article "Accidente del avión Pilatus PC-12 en Montana de 2009" (page 2385948, revision 175015434), translated into English with AI assistance; merged with NTSB case WPR09MA159 (events / aircraft)
- Date
- NTSB record WPR09MA159: NTSB narrative opening date, consistent with the API date and time (local date)
- Place and country
- Wikipedia infobox: site; country from NTSB record WPR09MA159
- Map position
- NTSB record WPR09MA159: events decimal coordinates
- Aircraft, operator and route
- NTSB record WPR09MA159: aircraft; gaps from Wikipedia infobox: aircraft type, registration, operator, origin and destination; route airports from the linked airport articles' Wikidata codes (OurAirports)
- Operation
- NTSB record WPR09MA159: operated under Part 91: General Aviation
- Fatalities
- NTSB record WPR09MA159: NTSB API totalFatal
- Ground fatalities
- NTSB record WPR09MA159: events.inj_f_grnd
- Summary
- Wikipedia infobox: summary
Source notes (3)
- One occurrence in two sources, merged: the Wikipedia article "2009 Pilatus PC-12 crash in Montana" and NTSB case WPR09MA159, matched by the same aircraft registration and date. For this US event the NTSB's values are used where the two differ; each value names its source.
- 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.