FTW96LA366 · Cessna 421B
Cessna 421B · Accident: in flight encounter with weather en route
From Albuquerque International Sunport (ABQ) to 3K1 · Alva, OK
Event
- NTSB case
- FTW96LA366
- 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 421B
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 421
- 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
- N55HU
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Albuquerque International Sunport (ABQ), Albuquerque, NMTo 3K1 · Alva, 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
- 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
- In flight encounter with weather
- 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 › Flight into adverse weather, inadvertent
- Pilot in command › Incapacitation(anoxia/hypoxia)
- Weather condition › Hail
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
At 1615, the pilot called FSS for a weather briefing and to file an IFR flight plan. He was told that there was thunderstorm activity, which was building in intensity, extending from Raton, New Mexico, to Garden City, Kansas, with some scattered activity in the Oklahoma panhandle. The briefer further reported that the thunderstorm activity was moving east, southeast. The pilot checked in with Albuquerque Center at 1750 during his departure climb to 21,000 feet. At 1755, convective SIGMET 70C was issued for isolated severe thunderstorms located 10 miles north, northeast, of Las Vegas, New Mexico. FAA Order 7110.65J, Air Traffic Control, section 2-6-2, states that 'controllers shall advise pilots of hazardous weather that may impact operations within 150 NM of their sector or area of jurisdiction.' SIGMET 70C was not given to the pilot by the center controller. Radio contact was lost at 1823. The pilot reported that the airplane was in VMC, approaching precipitation, when they encountered hail and the pilot's windshield was broken out which resulted in the airplane's depressurization.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadvertent flight into hail which shattered the pilot's windshield and resulted in his incapacitation due to hypoxia.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record FTW96LA366
- Event ID
- 20001208X06517
- Case number
- FTW96LA366
- 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 1996-08-31.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 345353b9b88cc2e72c94359ce2d1ea0f10a5aad8c477eb31dd6f9e47548dbf2a; retrieved 2026-09-21T12:29:31.124Z.