IAD98FA070 · Cessna 172N
Cessna 172N · Accident: loss of control in flight on approach
From Osvaldo Vieira International Airport (OXB) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- IAD98FA070
- 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 172N
- 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
- N5944E
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Osvaldo Vieira International Airport (OXB)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
- Approach · VFR go-around
- 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
- Loss of control in flight
- 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
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot had planned to make three takeoffs and landing for night currency. The pilot did not contact Flight Service for a weather briefing nor did he file a flight plan. When the pilot took off, visibility was poor due to heavy mist. A witness said visibility worsened when a wall of fog covered the airfield while the airplane was in the traffic pattern. He heard the airplane at full power, and watched it fly about 100 feet over the hangars where the landing gear was illuminated by the rotating beacon. The witness stated 'he throttled up to do a go-around' and heard the airplane all the way to impact. Emergency crews from four different municipalities required 1 hour and 20 minutes to locate the wreckage on the airport due to heavy fog. The airspeed indicator needle was crushed against the face at the 160 knot striation. The engine tachometer needle was crushed against the face at the 3200 RPM striation, 500 RPM above the placarded redline. A review of the pilot's logbook revealed he had 135 hours of total flight experience. He had logged 1.8 hours in the month before the accident. Prior to that, he had not flown in 7 months, and his last night experience was 18 months prior to the accident. He was not instrument rated.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain control of the aircraft due to spatial disorientation. Contributing factors wer fog, dark night conditions, lack of recent experience, inadequate preflight planning, and flight into known adverse weather.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record IAD98FA070
- Event ID
- 20001211X10330
- Case number
- IAD98FA070
- 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 1998-06-22.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 99ece1a9bcb11ce571390c42ef3c384ad56d66b7864f081a972679b56ccafe24; retrieved 2026-09-20T22:32:01.455Z.