DEN90FA002 · Cessna 182A
Cessna 182A · Accident: in flight encounter with weather en route
From 061 · Cameron Park, CA to Elko Regional Airport (EKO)
Event
- NTSB case
- DEN90FA002
- 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
- General aviation
- 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 182A
- 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
- N2155G
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From 061 · Cameron Park, CATo Elko Regional Airport (EKO), Elko, 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
- In flight encounter with weather
- 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 › Spatial disorientation
- Pilot in command › VFR flight into imc, continued
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
AT ABOUT 0430 PDT, THE NON-INSTRUMENT RATED PLT DEPD CAMERON PARK, CA, ON A FLT TO ELKO, NV, WHERE HE WAS TO RPRT TO WORK BETWEEN 0700 & 0730. WHILE EN ROUTE, THE ACFT CRASHED ON NEARLY LEVEL TERRAIN, NEAR THE BASE OF A MTN, AT AN ELEVATION OF ABOUT 4800'. IMPACT OCCURRED AT DAWN. AN EXAM OF THE WRECKAGE REVEALED THE ACFT CRASHED AT HIGH SPEED, WHILE IN A LEFT WING LOW, NOSE LOW ATTITUDE. A WX STUDY SHOWED CLOUDS EXISTED IN THE AREA FROM 6000' TO 15,000' MSL WITH WX CELLS MOVING FROM SOUTHWEST TO NORTHEAST. APRX 35 MI WEST-SOUTHWEST AT RENO (ELEV 4412'), THE WX WAS (IN PART) 1000' SCATTERED, 3200' OVERCAST, VISIBILITY 8 MI, WIND FROM 290 DEG AT 6 KTS. NO PREIMPACT PART FAILURE OR MALFUNCTION OF THE ACFT OR ENG WAS FOUND. RADAR DATA SHOWED THAT JUST BEFORE IMPACT, THE ACFT'S ALTITUDE VARIED FROM 12,500' TO 8,300' MSL, WITH A DESCENT RATE OF UP TO 2900'/MIN. NO RECORD OF A WX BRIEFING WAS FOUND.
Probable cause
CONTINUED FLIGHT BY THE NON-INSTRUMENT RATED PILOT INTO INSTRUMENT METEOROLOGICAL CONDITIONS (IMC), AND HIS FAILURE TO MAINTAIN CONTROL OF THE AIRCRAFT, DUE TO SPATIAL DISORIENTATION. INADEQUATE PREFLIGHT PREFLIGHT PLANNING/PREPARATION BY THE PILOT, AND THE WEATHER AND LIGHT CONDITIONS AT EARLY DAWN WERE FACTORS.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DEN90FA002
- Event ID
- 20001213X29578
- Case number
- DEN90FA002
- 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: ea78e380039bb9026a3ce8c0d636779af71e0f5c2381138f39fe2bf66798d1ea; retrieved 2026-09-21T03:07:36.504Z.