CHI01FA064 · Cessna 172K
Cessna 172K · Accident: in flight encounter with weather en route
From Sky King Airport (3I3) to Indy South Greenwood Airport (HFY)
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI01FA064
- 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
- Unknown
- 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 172K
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 172
- 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
- N46628
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Sky King Airport (3I3), Terre Haute, INTo Indy South Greenwood Airport (HFY), Greenwood, IN
- 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
- 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 › Flight into known adverse weather, continued
- Pilot in command › Flight to destination alternate, not performed
- Pilot in command › Spatial disorientation
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane, piloted by a non-instrument rated pilot, was destroyed when it impacted trees and terrain. Instrument meteorological conditions prevailed at the time of the accident. The pilot had been in communication with air traffic control prior to the accident. The pilot was given the weather conditions at an airport 11 nm from the intended destination as, "visibility one quarter with freezing fog the scattered ceiling is at one hundred feet and broken at ah seven hundred feet our rvrs are all ah below eight hundred for the runways i'm not sure you want to come this direction." The air traffic controller suggested an airport that was 6 nm in front of the airplane as an alternate. Witnesses in the area of the accident site reported foggy conditions on the night of the accident. Radar data shows that after being given the weather conditions and the suggested alternate airport, the aircraft continued to fly in a predominately easterly direction. Postaccident examination of the aircraft did not reveal any anomalies that could be associated with a preexisting condition.
Probable cause
The pilots decision not to fly to the alternate airport, his decision to continue the flight in known adverse weather conditions, spatial disorientation by the pilot, and his failure to maintain aircraft control. Factors were the low ceilings, the dark night, the fog, and the trees.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI01FA064
- Event ID
- 20010122X00334
- Case number
- CHI01FA064
- 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, coordinates. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2001-01-13.
- API snapshot SHA-256: bf93e29938fb6d153aff5a041a93fd2c969db1c9d08c036786011a0a7d76add3; retrieved 2026-09-20T20:42:10.112Z.