IAD98FA012 · Cessna 182A
Cessna 182A · Accident: in flight encounter with weather en route
From I78 · Marysville, OH to Columbiana County Airport (02G)
Event
- NTSB case
- IAD98FA012
- 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
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
Cessna 182A
- 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
- N6068B
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From I78 · Marysville, OHTo Columbiana County Airport (02G), East Liverpool, OH
- 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 · climb to 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
- 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
- Visual flight rules (VFR) flight into instrument meteorological conditions (IMC)
- 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 › Aircraft control, not maintained
- Pilot in command › Spatial disorientation
- Pilot in command › VFR flight into imc, attempted
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The non instrument rated pilot recorded 362 hours of total flight time over 30 years of flying, with 6 hours recorded in the last 90 days. The pilot did not receive a weather briefing or file a flight plan for the 150 mile flight. An instrument rated pilot, who took off from the departure airport 15 minutes prior to the accident, stated that 'the weather conditions to the east of the airport looked extremely dark with the ceiling nearly to the ground.' A pilot flying an approach into the departure airport from the east stated that he spotted the accident airplane in a steep climb and it appeared to be in and out of the clouds. A witness to the accident stated that the bottom of the clouds came down to the top of the power transmission towers that crossed his field, and snow was falling, reducing visibility to approximately 3/4 mile. He heard the airplane, but could not see it until it came out of the bottom of the clouds in a nose down attitude. He stated that the engine sounded as if it went to full power prior to ground impact. No airframe or engine malfunction was detected during the examination of the wreckage.
Probable cause
The pilot's attempted VFR flight into instrument conditions and the loss of aircraft ctontrol subsequent to the pilot's spatial disorientation. Contributing factors were low ceilings, snow and the pilot's failure to obtain a preflight weather briefing, as well as his lack of instrument certification.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record IAD98FA012
- Event ID
- 20001208X09189
- Case number
- IAD98FA012
- 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: 3ee650c58f550aafccbeedf1fc00f39251b930101f5e0e6c54efea1ef14a72e0; retrieved 2026-09-20T22:45:22.531Z.