Pilatus PC-12 Accidents: What the NTSB Records Show and What Families Should Know

If Someone You Know Was Aboard a PC-12: What Kind of Airplane and Flight It Was

The PC-12 is an airplane model built by Pilatus Aircraft Ltd. The NTSB lists Pilatus Aircraft Ltd. of Stans as a participant in one of the investigations below, along with the Swiss Transportation Safety Investigation Board. The NTSB records on this page name three variants: the PC-12/45, the PC-12/47 and the PC-12/47E.

The same records show how differently these airplanes fly in the United States. One was flown for work use. Two were personal flights. One was an on-demand charter flight carrying nine passengers. Another was a non-emergency medical transport with a patient, a flight paramedic and a flight nurse aboard. So "a PC-12 flight" can mean a private trip, a paid charter or an air ambulance, and the label on the flight matters.

Those labels come from federal flight rules. Part 91 is the general set of operating and flight rules that covers private and other non-commercial flying. Part 135 is the set of rules for operators that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) authorizes to carry people on demand for hire, such as air taxi, charter and many air ambulance flights. The NTSB's reports state which set of rules each flight was conducted under.

For a family or an injured passenger, that category shapes which federal safety rules applied and which people or companies may have owed duties to the passengers. If you are piecing together what happened, the flight type, the operator's name and the model variant are often the first facts worth confirming, and the NTSB record usually lists them. Nothing on this page states or suggests that the manufacturer, or anyone else, caused any accident described here.

Reading the NTSB Record for a PC-12 Accident You Are Following

The records below come from the NTSB's aviation accident data, newest first. Records located in California are left out of this national page. The list is this site's own selection from the NTSB dataset, not an NTSB statistic, and it is not a total of PC-12 accidents.

A preliminary report is the NTSB's early factual summary, issued while the investigation is still open. It does not state a cause, and the NTSB marks it as subject to change. A final report is issued when the investigation is complete. It states the probable cause, which is the NTSB's own determination of what caused the accident.

May 17, 2025, Henderson, Nevada (WPR25LA160). The aircraft was a PC-12/47 on a Part 91 work-use flight. The NTSB records the defining event as a runway excursion and records no injuries. In its final report for WPR25LA160, the NTSB states the probable cause as "The pilot's failure to maintain directional control while landing with a quartering tailwind."

March 7, 2025, near Sleetmute, Alaska (ANC25LA027). The aircraft was a PC-12/45 on a Part 135 on-demand charter flight. According to the NTSB's preliminary report for ANC25LA027, the left windscreen cracked at altitude and then came out of the airplane. The pilot diverted and landed, and the pilot and nine passengers were not injured. The report says "An examination of the window frame is pending." The investigation is open, and on October 17, 2026, the NTSB dataset carried no probable-cause statement for it.

July 26, 2024, near Recluse, Wyoming (WPR24FA257). The aircraft was a PC-12/47E on a Part 91 personal flight. The pilot and six passengers were fatally injured. In its final report for WPR24FA257, the NTSB states the probable cause as "The pilot's loss of control due to spatial disorientation while operating in instrument meteorological conditions, which resulted in an in-flight breakup. Contributing to the accident was the pilot's distraction from the autopilot disconnecting due to an updraft from convective activity."

December 14, 2023, near Christoval, Texas (CEN24FA064). The aircraft was a PC-12/45 on a Part 91 personal flight. The pilot, one passenger and three pets were fatally injured. The NTSB's final report for CEN24FA064 states the probable cause as "The pilot's loss of control due to spatial disorientation while operating in instrument meteorological conditions." It adds that contributing factors were "the controller's failure to issue an appropriate intercept angle for the final approach course, failure to advise the pilot that vectors would take the airplane through the final approach course, and the pilot's entry of an incorrect heading into the autopilot."

February 24, 2023, near Stagecoach, Nevada (WPR23MA113). The aircraft was a PC-12/45 on a Part 135 non-emergency patient transport. The pilot, a flight paramedic, a flight nurse and two passengers were fatally injured. In its final report for WPR23MA113, the NTSB states the probable cause as "The pilot's loss of control due to spatial disorientation while operating in night instrument meteorological conditions, which resulted in an in-flight breakup." It also states: "Contributing to the accident was the disengagement of the autopilot for undetermined reasons, as well as the operator's insufficient flight risk assessment process and lack of organizational oversight."

For families, the gap between a preliminary report and a final one can feel like a long wait with no answers. That wait is built into the process: a preliminary report records facts, not a finding of cause. If the accident you are following has only a preliminary report, it may help to note its accident number and check whether its status has changed, since the record can be updated as the investigation goes on. A conversation with an attorney can help sort out what an open investigation does and does not mean for a family's questions.

How the NTSB Investigates — and What Its Reports Can and Cannot Do for Your Family

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is the independent federal agency that investigates civil aviation accidents in the United States. Its regulation, 49 C.F.R. § 831.4, says it investigates "to determine the facts, conditions, and circumstances relating to an accident." It then uses those results to determine probable causes and to issue safety recommendations. The same regulation draws a clear line around that work: investigations "are not conducted for the purpose of determining the rights, liabilities, or blame of any person or entity, as they are not adjudicatory proceedings."

Under 49 C.F.R. § 831.13, the material the NTSB collects includes photographs, physical evidence from the scene, interview statements, wreckage documentation, and flight data and cockpit voice recorder information. Parties taking part in the investigation must promptly give such information to the NTSB unless the NTSB authorizes them to keep it.

The rule many families do not expect comes from 49 U.S.C. § 1154(b):

"No part of a report of the Board, related to an accident or an investigation of an accident, may be admitted into evidence or used in a civil action for damages resulting from a matter mentioned in the report."

In plain terms, a final report's probable cause can explain an accident to the public and shape safety changes. It cannot be the proof in a lawsuit over that accident. The NTSB's reports also note that a separate factual report "may be admissible" under the same section. A civil case is built on its own evidence, gathered through its own process.

The FAA is a different agency. It approves aircraft designs through a type certificate, which is the federal approval of an aircraft model's design. It also sets airworthiness standards and certificates pilots and operators. FAA records are separate from NTSB investigation reports. Nothing on this page states that either agency found a defect in the PC-12.

For a family, this means a probable-cause finding, however clear it reads, is not the end of the question of who may be responsible. If you have read a final report and are wondering what it means for a claim, an attorney can help explain how a case's own evidence is gathered alongside, and apart from, the NTSB's work.

Why the Type of Flight Matters If You Were on Board

If you were a passenger, one of the first questions in any later legal conversation is what kind of flight it was. A Part 135 operator is a company the FAA has certificated to fly on-demand charter or air taxi operations for hire. A Part 91 flight is usually a private trip, often owner-flown or flown for the owner's own business.

The rules around a Part 135 flight are more extensive than the general Part 91 rules. They cover the operator's certificate, its procedures, and the training and oversight of its crews. As a result, the duties owed to a paying charter or air ambulance passenger can differ from the duties owed to a friend riding along on a private flight. Two of the records above were Part 135 flights and three were Part 91, so the same airplane model can sit in very different legal settings. The small plane crashes page explains the general differences between these flight categories.

The people and companies whose conduct may matter in an aviation claim usually fall into a few groups: the operator, the pilot-in-command, the aircraft or component manufacturer, and a maintenance or repair organization. Air traffic control can also come up, as one NTSB final report above shows. Naming these groups says nothing about any company or person in any record here.

Product liability is the legal theory that a defect in an aircraft or one of its parts caused or contributed to an accident. A crash does not prove a defect, and an injury does not prove anyone's fault. A label in an investigation is not a court verdict either, a point the pilot error explainer covers in detail. Which parties and which theories fit a particular flight depends on the facts of that flight and that accident.

If You Are Considering a Claim: What the Law Asks and What Varies by State

Most aviation injury claims rest on negligence, product liability or both. If a family is weighing a negligence claim, the questions a court asks come down to four. Did someone owe the people aboard a duty, meaning a legal obligation to act with reasonable care? Was that care not taken, which is called a breach? Did that breach actually cause the harm, which is causation? And did the family or passenger suffer real losses, which are the damages? Whether each element is met depends on the facts. Product liability is a separate theory, aimed at a defect in the aircraft or a component rather than at how someone flew or maintained it.

When someone dies, the claim is usually a wrongful death action, brought by surviving family members, or for them, after a death caused by another's wrongful act. Wrongful death is governed by state law, and states differ on who may bring the claim, which losses may be sought, how long a family has to file and how fault shared among several parties is handled. In practice, that means whether a particular relative can bring the claim at all, and what losses that relative can seek, turns on which state's law applies. As one example, the site's Texas aviation accident claims page covers that state's rules. The aviation wrongful death page explains how families' claims work more broadly.

A limitation period, or statute of limitations, is the time within which a claim must be filed. Its length, the date it starts to run and its exceptions come from the law of the state that applies, and they turn on the facts. That is why the period for one family can look nothing like the period for another, and why a claim filed after the applicable period may be lost.

If a fatal flight went down over the open ocean, beyond U.S. waters, a family's claim may be governed by a federal law, the Death on the High Seas Act, rather than state wrongful death law. It is a separate framework, and it matters mainly in that setting.

What a family or injured passenger may recover depends on the categories of loss the applicable law recognizes. Depending on the state and the claim, those may include medical expenses, lost income, loss of consortium (the loss of a spouse's or family member's companionship) and survival damages for the person who died. What any law allows depends on that law and on the facts. Which state's law applies, who in the family has standing and when the filing period runs are among the questions an attorney can help sort out early.

What Families and Injured Passengers Often Gather After an Accident

If you were hurt, or lost someone, the records that usually come up include the NTSB report and its investigation docket. Each final report above links to a docket page, which can hold factual reports, interview statements and documentation that investigators reviewed. Other records that may matter include any FAA airworthiness directives or manufacturer service bulletins for the aircraft. For a charter flight, the operator's Part 135 certificate and operations documents may matter too, along with maintenance logs and flight records.

Personal records sit alongside those official ones: medical records and bills, records of missed work, photos, messages about the trip, the ticket or charter booking, and the names of anyone who saw what happened.

The NTSB docket is not the end of the evidence. A civil lawsuit has its own discovery process, the court-supervised way parties obtain documents and testimony from each other, and it is not limited to what the investigation produced. Cockpit recordings follow special federal limits, set out in the same section 1154, on when a court may allow their discovery.

Seeing a stack of reports is one thing; knowing which ones bear on a particular claim is another. If it would help to talk through what these records mean for your family, you can request a case evaluation and discuss it with our attorney. The site's aviation accident claims overview also explains how the federal and state layers fit together.