FirstAlerts
Plane CrashesVersion 2

One killed in Piper PA-22-150 crash near Oroville, California

The National Transportation Safety Board accident record lists one person aboard and one fatality in the February 28, 2026 accident; the cause has not been determined.

By AI ReporterUpdated Aug 7, 2026, 10:03 a.m. ET
One person was killed when a was destroyed near Oroville, California, on February 28, 2026, at about 5:48 p.m. local time, according to the National Transportation Safety Board accident record. This is a developing event and details may change. The record lists one person aboard and one fatality, and classifies the flight as a Part 91 general aviation flight. The aircraft is listed as destroyed. The NTSB is investigating, and the cause has not been determined. The accident record gives the registration as . Aircraft registry records describe as a , a single-engine piston landplane with a Lycoming 0-320 series engine, serial number 22-7122, registered in the United States. The registry lists the registered owner as Garrity Frank B; the owner of record is not necessarily the operator, the pilot, or otherwise connected to the flight. Weather observed at Oroville Municipal Airport (KOVE), 3.9 miles away and five minutes from the reported time of the accident, recorded calm wind, 10 statute miles visibility, clear skies and 69°F. Those are instrument readings and say nothing about what happened. Geographic reference data places Oroville in Butte County, California, at a settlement terrain elevation of 167 ft, 3.9 miles ENE of Oroville Municipal Airport and 3.9 miles NNE of Siller Bros Inc Airport (97CL). As a matter of record, the NTSB database, which begins in 2008, contains 64 other cases involving the , of which 6 involved a fatality. That count is a record of past cases only and says nothing about the cause of this accident.

Was this report accurate and useful?

Reference data

From aircraft and geographic registries, not from the news sources. Registry records can be out of date, and describe the aircraft and the place only — they say nothing about what happened.

Registration
N3170Z
Type
Piper PA-22-150 — single-engine piston landplane
Engines
LYCOMING 0-320 SERIES
Registered owner
Garrity Frank BThe owner of record is not necessarily the operator, the pilot, or otherwise connected to the flight.
Terrain elevation
167 ft
Nearest aerodrome
3.9 miles NNE of Siller Bros Inc Airport (97CL)

Sources

No sources recorded.

Revision history

  1. Version 27 Aug 2026, 14:03current

    Restated that the elevation figure refers to the settlement, folded the investigation status into one sentence; no new facts.

  2. Version 15 Aug 2026, 16:49

    First published.

How we work

This site models an investigative reporter rather than a wire desk. The aim is the most complete, accurate and timely account we can assemble — all three, not a trade between them. Reports go out within minutes of the coverage they are built from, carrying context a newsroom would otherwise need a day and a records request to gather: what has happened at this place before, what the operator’s record is, which aircraft it actually was.

Reports are built from primary sources — accident and court records, official registries, weather observations, agency statements — and from reputable news organisations, each named where their reporting is used. Facts are extracted before anything is written, and every one must be supported by a quotation found in the source itself; the model that writes the report is given only those verified facts and never sees the article, so it cannot introduce a detail no source stated.

Where sources disagree we publish the disagreement, attributed, rather than picking a figure. Where a fact comes from a record rather than a reporter, we say so, and the language matches: an instrument reading is never described as something anyone confirmed. Some things are deliberately withheld — a suspect is not named until an agency names them on the record, victims until families or officials release them — and corrections appear as visible revisions, never as silent edits.

None of that makes a report true. A quotation check proves a source said something, not that it was right, and an automated system can be confidently wrong in ways the checks do not catch. If something here is wrong, the feedback above is how it gets found. The full methodology, including what we refuse to publish.