DEN01LA039 · Cessna 152
Cessna 152 · Accident: in flight encounter with weather during initial climb
From U77 · Spanish Fork, UT to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- DEN01LA039
- 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
- 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 152
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 152
- 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
- N108ES
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From U77 · Spanish Fork, UTTo 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 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
- 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 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
- Flightcrew › Weather evaluation, improper
- Pilot in command › VFR flight into imc, inadvertent
- Pilot passenger › 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 pilot reported that he and pilot-rated passenger assessed the weather conditions before departing on the local night flight, and determined it was safe to fly. The pilot estimated the visibility to be 5 miles. Shortly after takeoff, both the pilot and pilot rated passenger lost sight of the ground and horizon. The pilot wrote, "I felt the passenger/pilot grab the [control] yoke. I asked what he was doing. He said he felt we were turning. I then noticed we were going down." The pilot-rated passenger said they were "disoriented. [The pilot] thought we should descend a little. That's what we were doing when we hit the lake. We didn't really see it coming." He made no mention of control interference. Neither pilot was instrument rated. The airplane impacted a frozen lake, skidded about 300 feet, and fell through the ice. A witness reported that the visibility was 2 miles in fog.
Probable cause
Improper weather evaluation by both the pilot and pilot/passenger, and the pilot's inadvertent VFR flight into IMC resulting in his spatial disorientation. Factors were the pilot rated passenger's spatial disorientation, fog, and night conditions.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DEN01LA039
- Event ID
- 20010126X00362
- Case number
- DEN01LA039
- 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 2001-01-07.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 57041fd8095d68bb8a7ff5f7996b27fe6a4099875f7b8db25f1555ef8e2d746f; retrieved 2026-09-21T10:16:47.000Z.