IAD98FA032 · Cessna 172P
Langley Aero Club Cessna 172P · Accident: in flight encounter with weather during initial climb
From Langley Air Force Base (LFI) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- IAD98FA032
- 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 172P
- 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
- N62082
- Operator
- Langley Aero Club
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Langley Air Force Base (LFI)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 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
- Initial climb
- 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, inadvertent
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The two pilots filed a local VFR flight plan and departed the 10,000 feet long runway to the east. According to United States Air Force weather observers, a cloud layer at 300 feet with fog was approaching the airport from the northeast at the same time the airplane departed. Shortly after takeoff, the airplane transmitted to the tower, '...we're going to come back for landing...uh...the ceiling is lower than we thought.' The tower controller acknowledged the call and instructed the airplane to report when it reached the base leg of the traffic pattern. The tower controller observed the airplane enter a climbing left turn and disappear into the approaching cloud layer. He said, 'It was nice and clear in all quadrants with a little overcast/light fog to the east.' Witnesses in proximity to the crash site reported they heard the airplane but could not be see it until it descended vertically out of the low cloud cover. The airplane collided with terrain and a building in the vicinity of the downwind leg of the traffic pattern. Examination of the wreckage revealed no pre-impact anomalies. The pilot in the left seat did not posses an instrument rating.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadvertent VFR flight into IMC conditions, and the subsequent loss of aircraft control due to spatial disorientation. A factor in the accident was the low ceiling.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record IAD98FA032
- Event ID
- 20001211X09687
- Case number
- IAD98FA032
- 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: 1b0bad41f01375e8232bc36fecf8cde02781cc576a7c60091820abfad281cd51; retrieved 2026-09-20T22:40:08.001Z.