CHI00LA198 · Cessna T188C
Cessna T188C · Accident: on ground/water collision with terrain/water during takeoff
From Private airstrip to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI00LA198
- 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 T188C
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 188
- 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
- N9957J
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Private airstripTo 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 137: Agricultural
- 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
- Takeoff
- 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 › Clearance, not maintained
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The aircraft was substantially damaged when it failed to clear crops on takeoff. In a written statement, the pilot stated, 'Took off from Austin at 3:30. Went to farm Hay field landed. Loaded plane with chemical (160 gal.) to spray a soybean field across the road. On the takeoff run got airborne but couldn't clear hill at end of field. Wind had died by then. Dumped part of the load but not soon enough. Tried to land in the field going up hill. Dirt was soft and plane veered left and nosed over and stopped.' Weather at Rochester, MN, reported at 1354, gave winds as 040 degrees at 6 knots. Winds reported at 1454 were 080 degrees at 8 knots. Winds reported 2 minutes prior to the accident were 060 degrees at 6 knots. Winds reported at 1654 were 090 degrees at 5 knots.
Probable cause
the failure of the pilot to maintain clearance with the terrain.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI00LA198
- Event ID
- 20001212X21390
- Case number
- CHI00LA198
- 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: 2f508e3b1b0c8f4cd8ab5bf77c134cd695c462b55f2628960920c4f9f1619ff5; retrieved 2026-09-22T12:41:20.878Z.