CHI96LA313 · Cessna A188B
Cessna A188B · Accident: in flight collision with object while maneuvering
From Aitutaki Airport (AIT) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI96LA313
- 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
- Visual Meteorological Cond
Cessna A188B
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 188
- 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
- N4797Q
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Aitutaki Airport (AIT)To not recorded
- 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 137: Agricultural
- 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 · aerial application
- 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, transmission
- 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 › Clearance, not maintained
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
A witness on the ground who was assisting the pilot with the aerial application as flagman said that the pilot had said to him over the radio that the sun was getting in his eyes and that he was having difficulty seeing him. The pilot had made a pass on the field from west to the east and turned left to head westbound into the sun. 'I turned away to step off for the next pass, heard my wife scream and looked over to see the airplane skid to a halt.' As the witness was going to the airplane, he noticed the power lines were down. Another witness on the ground, the flagman's wife, saw the airplane make a left turn at the east end of the field 'to come back west which was into the sun. The left side of the airplane was a little low at that point. He (the pilot) was coming down fast and hit the ground.
Probable cause
the pilot's failure to maintain clearance from known transmission lines. Factors relating to this accident were the transmission lines and the sunglare which hindered the pilot's ability to see the transmission lines.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI96LA313
- Event ID
- 20001208X06473
- Case number
- CHI96LA313
- 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 1996-08-23.
- API snapshot SHA-256: b242bca19cbe93139c86cbab418437fbc0981f3446398fb8ac9659cf9665c09b; retrieved 2026-09-21T12:31:44.470Z.