DEN01FA027 · Mooney M20K
Mooney M20K · Accident: in flight encounter with weather en route
From MCI · Kansas City, KS to Ogden Hinckley Airport (OGD)
Event
- NTSB case
- DEN01FA027
- 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
Mooney M20K
- Aircraft type
- Mooney M20
- 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
- N5772C
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From MCI · Kansas City, KSTo Ogden Hinckley Airport (OGD), UT
- 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 · descent
- 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 › VFR flight into imc, inadvertent
Approximate · Estimated position: the centre of Ogden, UT, the place the record names. Not the accident site.
NTSB narrative
During descent at the end of a dark night VFR cross country flight, the pilot reported that he had his destination in sight and cancelled flight following. Approximately 1 minute and 15 seconds later, the airplane, which was heading west, impacted the east side of a mountain ridge about 6 nautical miles short of the destination airport. The weather conditions in the accident area were high winds from the west with blowing snow. Additionally, moderate to severe turbulence was forecast below 10,000 feet. The pilot's total flight time on the day of the accident was 9 hours 39 minutes. During examination of the airplane wreckage, no pre-impact engine or airframe anomalies that might have affected the airplane's performance were identified.
Probable cause
the pilot's inadvertent VFR flight into IMC, which resulted in a collision with mountainous terrain. Contributing factors were the blowing snow, turbulence, dark night light conditions, and pilot fatigue due to the long flight day.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DEN01FA027
- Event ID
- 20001226X45481
- Case number
- DEN01FA027
- 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 2000-12-15.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 03fe528e8c00c7c412aff68a0507355fd0f99a47f9cf1b32aef1a4f472ca81c7; retrieved 2026-09-20T20:43:37.292Z.