CHI98FA274 · Cessna 172M
Cessna 172M · Accident: in flight collision with object en route
From Grosse Ile Municipal Airport (ONZ) to 6GB
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI98FA274
- 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
- Visual Meteorological Cond
Cessna 172M
- 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
- N1461V
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Grosse Ile Municipal Airport (ONZ), GROSS ILE, MITo 6GB
- 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 collision with object
- 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
- Wire, static; Wire, transmission
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Pilot in command › Proper touchdown point, not attained
- Pilot in command › Visual lookout, not maintained
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
A witness reported seeing the aircraft touch down about midfield on the Runway 01 (2,822 ft x 100 ft, turf). Approximately 600 ft from the runway end, the pilot attempted a go-around. The witness then saw the flaps being retracted when the aircraft passed over the road and it appeared the aircraft appeared to struggle while trying to get over the high tension power lines, but went between the top ground wire and the next wire down. The aircraft was banking to the right and caught the right wing tip on the second wire. The propeller surfaces had chord wise scratching and gouging with burnishing of the leading edges of both blades. One blade of the propeller exhibited S-shaped bending. Aileron, elevator and rudder flight control continuity was established. The unmarked power static and transmission lines were located 1/4 mile north of the departure end of the runway. The transmission lines had a height of 102 feet.
Probable cause
The proper touchdown point was not attained and the visual lookout not being maintained by the pilot-in-command. Contributing factors to the accident were the unmarked static and transmission wires.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI98FA274
- Event ID
- 20001211X10480
- Case number
- CHI98FA274
- 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: 3ac9c0d4ca2347827c8d86fd81b5e43e4ca83a4a392bac0d0e6780892aad654b; retrieved 2026-09-20T22:29:26.665Z.