Into terrain: controlled flight into terrain

Controlled flight into terrain is an airworthy aircraft, under the crew's control, flown into the ground, water or an obstacle - usually because nobody on board knew how close it was. Night, cloud, mountains and a misread approach are the recurring settings.

Ground proximity warning systems, and later terrain databases that look ahead of the aircraft, were built to stop exactly these. The NTSB codes it as the defining event from 2008 and as a collision with terrain or water before that; for Wikipedia records it is read from the article's infobox.

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