CHI00LA289 · Cessna A188B
Cessna A188B · Accident: in flight collision with object during initial climb
From Private airstrip to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI00LA289
- 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 A188B
- 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
- N9326R
- 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
- Initial climb
- 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
- 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 › Altitude/clearance, not obtained/maintained
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
During initial climb after takeoff the aerial application aircraft, loaded with 165-gallons of chemical, impacted a hay bale located off the end of the runway. The pilot maneuvered the aircraft back for a landing and during the landing the right main landing gear collapsed, the right wing impacted the terrain, and the aircraft skidded to a stop. Witnesses to the accident saw the aircraft impact a hay bale, located off the end of the runway used for the takeoff run, severing the right main landing gear. The pilot reported that the accident could have been prevented by, "I could have carried a smaller load or simply not flown when the density altitude gets too high. Also could have checked the adjacent fields for temporary obstructions (in this case some hay bales) that may have been placed there." The density altitude was approximated at 4,780-mean sea level.
Probable cause
altidude/clearance not obtained/maintained by the pilot. Factors to the accident were the hay bale, the inadequate preflight planning/preparation by the pilot, the high-density altitude, and the high weight of the aircraft at the time of the accident.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI00LA289
- Event ID
- 20001212X21922
- Case number
- CHI00LA289
- 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: a6d11573a2f9a33f135e6bd153305526934a17e1c0c3a140adb1196f156147ee; retrieved 2026-09-22T12:30:01.010Z.