DEN99LA063 · Cessna 172P
Cessna 172P · Accident en route
From City of Colorado Springs Municipal Airport (COS) to Four Corners Regional Airport (FMN)
Event
- NTSB case
- DEN99LA063
- 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
- API-reported fatalities
- 0 · all aircraft and ground
- Ground fatalities
- 0
- 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
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
Cessna 172P
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 172
- 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
- N96212
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From City of Colorado Springs Municipal Airport (COS), COLORADO SPGS, COTo Four Corners Regional Airport (FMN), Farmington, NM
- 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
- En route · cruise
- First occurrenceThe 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
- Miscellaneous/other
- Also codedOther events the NTSB coded in the sequence, such as a wire strike after a loss of power. Flight Findings uses them for its kinds of event. Glossary
- Visual flight rules (VFR) flight into instrument meteorological conditions (IMC)
- 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
- Pilot in command › Became lost/disoriented, encountered
- Pilot in command › Lack of certification
- Pilot in command › VFR flight into imc, intentional
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
During the flight from Colorado Springs, Colorado, to Farmington, New Mexico, in which no flight plan was filed, the pilot and his pilot-rated passenger were unable to identify the mountains due to the dark night conditions. The pilot realized the VORs were inoperative, and that he was disoriented. He identified the city lights of Dulce, New Mexico, and decided to divert to the old airport, even though it was closed. The pilot began experiencing 'unusual attitudes and was beginning to feel the effects of vertigo,' as he began to encounter snow, fog, and partial obscuration. The aircraft's windshield had also become 'cake[d] with ice.' The controller advised the pilot of the airport's position. He was unable to identify the runway, but observed a police car's flashing light and made the decision to land. Upon landing, the aircraft veered to the left of the runway and impacted a ditch 70 yards from the runway centerline, then nosed over. During the pilot's weather briefings in Farmington and Colorado Springs, the pilot was advised of an AIRMET that had been issued for gusty winds with possible freezing rain and rime icing below 18,000 feet (FL 180), and moderate to severe turbulence en route.
Probable cause
The pilot-in-command becoming disoriented during cruise flight, and his intentional flight into instrument meteorological conditions without proper certification. Factors were the existing weather conditions that included snow, fog, obscuration and icing, the dark night light conditions, the rough terrain condition on which to make a forced landing, and the closed runway.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DEN99LA063
- Event ID
- 20001205X00453
- Case number
- DEN99LA063
- Dataset
- historical-pre2008
- Source SHA-256
- 89e2df6d848e7ab3b42e7d7c7a03ff403303057a26ca04c95b3ea67201c3ce74
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 1999-04-08.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 69057f762e70fb20bb72dcdb5d630bbed6f3c6b64df1ee12518f9f8feb294e48; retrieved 2026-09-21T20:34:24.129Z.