LAX97FA331 · Cessna 172K
Cessna 172K · Accident: in flight encounter with weather en route
From Sky Ranch Airport (3L2) to 61B · Boulder City, NV
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX97FA331
- 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
- 1 · 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 172K
- 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
- N84621
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Sky Ranch Airport (3L2), NVTo 61B · Boulder City, NV
- 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 › Altitude/clearance, not maintained
- Pilot in command › Flight into known adverse weather, intentional
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot told a witness he had been 'skud-running' and made an earlier stop due to bad weather. He said he was instrument rated, but was not current. At the airport, the weather was estimated to be basic VFR. To the south, however, the sky was obscured with no lateral visibility. The pilot said he was going to fly to an airport north of his position. He did not get a weather briefing before departure. Subsequently, he reported an airport in sight and transmitted that he was descending on approach. The aircraft was found over a week later, about 9 miles southeast of the departure airport. The aircraft was found on the south side of an east-west ridge at about 3,000 feet msl. The off-route obstruction clearance altitude for that area was 8,800 feet.
Probable cause
the pilot's intentional VFR flight into adverse weather conditions, and his failure to maintain sufficient altitude or clearance from mountainous/hilly terrain. Related factors were: the high/mountainous/hilly terrain, and the adverse weather condition (low ceiling).
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX97FA331
- Event ID
- 20001208X08875
- Case number
- LAX97FA331
- 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 1997-09-26.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 7af632834a4918222695c219c3d8235a7b6e1f50405792ba3f4cdc8793c2f4d6; retrieved 2026-09-20T22:48:19.069Z.