LAX99FA020 · Cessna 182Q
Cessna 182Q · Accident: loss of control in flight en route
From O17 · Grass Valley, CA to Winnemucca Municipal Airport (WMC)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX99FA020
- 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
- 3 · 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 182Q
- 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
- N95726
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From O17 · Grass Valley, CATo Winnemucca Municipal Airport (WMC), Winnemucca, NV
- 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 · 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
- Loss of control in flight
- 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 › Flight into adverse weather, attempted
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The noninstrument rated pilot was en route VFR on a northeasterly course to the destination. During the last 8 minutes of the flight, recorded radar data showed the aircraft descending from 14,500 feet to 13,000 feet, on a southwesterly course until the aircraft abruptly entered a left descending spiral and disappeared from radar near the accident site. Meteorological data and pilot reports showed cloud tops in the area near 15,000 feet with higher tops further east and rime icing probable in the clouds. The pilot received a weather briefing from flight service the previous evening (11 hours before the flight) which forecast VFR conditions along the route. The pilot did not receive any further briefing before departing the following morning. Updated weather, available in the morning, contained reports of poorer weather than previously forecast.
Probable cause
The noninstrument rated pilot's failure to maintain control of the airplane during an attempted flight into adverse weather which resulted in inadvertent VFR flight into instrument meteorological conditions. Factors in the accident were the pilot's failure to obtain an updated briefing prior to departure, and icing conditions encountered after entering the clouds.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX99FA020
- Event ID
- 20001211X11281
- Case number
- LAX99FA020
- 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: b9663db8a5a71b87581cc678019b85bbb70d66da7ac56e7c3796ba78037322fa; retrieved 2026-09-20T22:20:34.544Z.