DEN00FA136 · Grumman American AA-5
Grumman American AA-5 · Accident: in flight collision with terrain/water while maneuvering
From Canyonlands Regional Airport (CNY) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- DEN00FA136
- 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
- 2 · 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
Grumman American AA-5
- Aircraft type
- Grumman American AA-5
- 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
- N7161L
- Operator
- Clinton J. Ford · private individual
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Canyonlands Regional Airport (CNY), Moab, UTTo 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
- Maneuvering · turn to reverse direction
- 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 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
- Destroyed
Cause areas
- Aircraft performance, turn capability › Exceeded
- Pilot in command › Judgment, poor
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The 21 year old private pilot received his certificate 16 days before the accident, and had logged about 150 total flight hours, 67 hours in type. His 44 year old pilot rated passenger was a local charter pilot and said to be thoroughly familiar with the surrounding terrain. Both pilots were avid 'BASE jumpers' (parachuting off of Bridges, Antennas, Structures, and Earth). The purpose of the flight was to scout for possible jump sites. The elevation at the airport was 4,553 feet msl, and the temperature was 93.2 degrees F. The computed density altitude was 7,407 feet msl. The airplane wreckage was found 5 days later on a talus slope at a 'Y' between two canyons at an elevation of 4,275 feet msl, or 145 feet above the floor of the canyon. The floor of the canyon was 4,130 feet msl, and the top of the canyon was at 5,243 feet msl. Examination of the accident site indicated the pilot was attempting to reverse course out of the canyon when the airplane impacted terrain. According to BLM personnel, temperatures in the canyons are considerably higher than at the airport.
Probable cause
The pilot in command exercising poor judgment and exceeding the aircraft's turning capability. Contributing factors were the pilots' attention being diverted, flying into a known blind canyon, high temperature, and high density altitude.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DEN00FA136
- Event ID
- 20001212X21428
- Case number
- DEN00FA136
- 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: 2c787747d01723e757757fa6df453c70061017d44815de0ca710d0faf44c0126; retrieved 2026-09-20T21:01:42.236Z.