NYC97FA144 · Cessna TR182
Century Air Cessna TR182 · Accident: in flight collision with terrain/water while maneuvering
From Linden Airport (LDJ) to Atlantic City, NJ
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC97FA144
- 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
- 2 · 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 TR182
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 182
- 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
- N737PK
- Operator
- Century Air
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Linden Airport (LDJ), Linden, NJTo Atlantic City, NJ
- 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 terrain/water
- 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 › Altitude/clearance, not maintained
Approximate · Estimated position: the centre of Seaside Heights, NJ, the place the record names. Not the accident site.
NTSB narrative
The pilot departed on a night cross-country flight. The airplane was observed on radar to climb to 2,500 feet and level off. When the airplane reached the coast line, it turned south, paralleled the coast, and began a descent. The airplane descended at 500 feet per minute, until it went below radar coverage at 1,000 feet, about 5 miles north of the accident area. Witnesses observed the airplane flying level, parallel to the coast, about 150 feet above the water, and fly over an amusement park pier. The airplane then turned left away from the coast to the open ocean, then it began another left turn to the north. During the northerly turn, it descended, struck the water, and sank about 1/2 mile off shore in the Atlantic Ocean, about 0230 EDT. The wreckage was not recovered. Nautical twilight was at 0426, and the moon was 20 degrees below the horizon. The pilot was not instrument rated, and 4 hours of dual night were documented on a 1 year old flight examination form.
Probable cause
failure of the pilot to maintain sufficient altitude/clearance above water, while maneuvering over the ocean during a dark moonless night. Related factors were: darkness, the pilot's probable illusion of altitude, spatial disorientation, and lack of instrument experience.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC97FA144
- Event ID
- 20001208X08478
- Case number
- NYC97FA144
- 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: f7e605b826c5a66c8f1a43fb32888168c6390be9d54e512f8c357b46c0603bc1; retrieved 2026-09-20T22:54:03.344Z.