DEN01FA003 · Cessna R-182
Cessna R-182 · Accident: in flight collision with terrain/water en route
From Gallup Municipal Airport (GUP) to Albuquerque International Sunport (ABQ)
Event
- NTSB case
- DEN01FA003
- 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
- 1 · 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
- Charter & commuter
- WeatherVisual meteorological conditions (VMC): good enough to fly by looking outside. Instrument conditions (IMC): cloud or low visibility, flying by instruments. Glossary
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
Cessna R-182
- Aircraft type
- Cessna R-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
- N182BG
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Gallup Municipal Airport (GUP), Gallup, NMTo Albuquerque International Sunport (ABQ), Albuquerque, NM
- 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 135: Air Taxi & Commuter
- 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
- In flight collision with terrain/water
- 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 › VFR flight into imc, continued
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot was flying a night VFR non-scheduled Part 135 cargo flight. Radar data indicates that he departed and climbed to a cruise altitude of 9,500 feet msl. Approximately 24 minutes after departure, the airplane began to climb again. The last radar return was received approximately 1 minute later. The airplane impacted heavily forested mountainous terrain at an elevation of approximately 10,500 feet. The MEA for a nearby airway was 13,300 feet. Examination of the airplane revealed no evidence of preimpact anomalies. A pilot who flew by the mountain the airplane impacted approximately 1 hour before the accident, reported IMC weather conditions with numerous low intensity rain showers in the area.
Probable cause
the pilot's continued VFR flight into IMC during cruise. Contributing factors were the dark night light conditions, and the cloudy weather conditions.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DEN01FA003
- Event ID
- 20001212X22140
- Case number
- DEN01FA003
- 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: local date, investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2000-10-11.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 365b404952c6d1431ceaf0f6a6d4e8c381531af78729158b5909c8db3b471a44; retrieved 2026-09-18T13:11:26.863Z.