FTW98LA360 · Cessna 170
Cessna 170 · Accident: on ground/water collision with terrain/water during landing
From Ogallala Municipal Airport Searle Field (OGA) to 1V5
Event
- NTSB case
- FTW98LA360
- 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
- 0 · 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 170
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 170
- 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
- N2574V
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Ogallala Municipal Airport Searle Field (OGA), Ogallala, NETo 1V5
- 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
- Landing · flare/touchdown
- 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
- On ground/water collision with terrain/water
- 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 › Compensation for wind conditions, inadequate
- Pilot in command › Ground loop/swerve, intentional
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
As the pilot approached the airport for a full stop landing, he heard the pilot of another airplane, which was landing on runway 8 report that he had a tail wind during his landing sequence. The pilot 'noticed the wind sock on the east end of the runway was standing straight out in a direction that appeared to be 180 degrees.' The pilot landed on runway 26, but reported having difficulty keeping the airplane aligned with the centerline. He said 'I didn't feel at the time I stood any chance of gaining airspeed to execute a climb.' He performed a ground loop rather then go in the lake on the west end of the runway. One witness reported that immediately after the accident they noticed that the wind was coming from the northeast. The winds at the nearest reporting station, 9 nautical miles southeast, were 180 degrees and 13 knots at 1549 and at 1655, the winds were 150 degrees and 11 knots gusting to 20 knots.
Probable cause
The pilot's intentional ground loop and his inadequate compensation for the wind condition. A contributng factor was crosswinds.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record FTW98LA360
- Event ID
- 20001211X10853
- Case number
- FTW98LA360
- 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: de1af8386083eae47caa05fdb577eac8e8edc870cc5d32d290bac23b18c9b4d8; retrieved 2026-09-21T20:42:52.797Z.