FTW96FA058 · Cessna 172P
Spartan Flight School Cessna 172P · Accident: in flight collision with object while maneuvering
From Stillwater Regional Airport (SWO) to Tulsa Riverside Airport (RVS)
Event
- NTSB case
- FTW96FA058
- 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
- 3 · 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
- Visual 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
- N98003
- Operator
- Spartan Flight School
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Stillwater Regional Airport (SWO), Stillwater, OKTo Tulsa Riverside Airport (RVS), Tulsa, OK
- 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
- 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
- In flight collision with object
- 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
- Wire, static
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Destroyed
Cause areas
- Pilot in command(cfi) › Low altitude flight/maneuver, intentional
- Terrain condition › Roadway/highway
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight instructor, his student, and a passenger departed Stillwater Municipal Airport at 0120 for a night instructional cross country flight. They flew east climbing to 3,500 feet MSL and parallel to the Cimarron Turnpike. The Cimarron Turnpike, elevation 980 feet, is a 4 lane white cement highway with a 10 foot wide grass strip separating the east and westbound lanes. The spacing of the eastbound traffic, at that time of night, was 5 to 8 miles apart and the moon was approximately 85% full. At 0138:20, radar showed the airplane flying a descending box pattern over the turnpike culminating with impacting the 7/16 inch stainless steel static wires which were 64 feet over the turnpike. The airplane impacted on the eastbound lanes and slid east, 3 feet north of the center line and exactly parallel to it for a 162 feet. Moments before the impact, witnesses 'noticed a bright, single light practically directly behind' them. Because no other vehicles arrived at the accident scene for approximately 5 minutes, they believe the bright light they saw was that of the airplane.
Probable cause
The flight instructor's intentional low altitude flight maneuver. Factors were the static wire and the bright night condition.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record FTW96FA058
- Event ID
- 20001207X04991
- Case number
- FTW96FA058
- 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: 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.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 94d9ab8b3483336f6eace5061c7006b2aff4466338cf3ce62a5fcc6e661f6228; retrieved 2026-09-20T23:30:49.915Z.