FTW01FA095 · Cessna 190
Cessna 190 · Accident: in flight encounter with weather en route
From Cook Airfield (K50) to Tupelo Regional Airport (TUP)
Event
- NTSB case
- FTW01FA095
- 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 190
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 190
- 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
- N1055D
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Cook Airfield (K50), Derby, KSTo Tupelo Regional Airport (TUP), Tupelo, MS
- 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); Tree(s)
- 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 › Spatial disorientation
- Pilot in command › VFR flight into imc, continued
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The non-instrument rated private pilot was flying at 7,500 feet on a cross-country flight when he reported to air traffic control (ATC) that he wanted to descend due to "haze." The flight descended to 5,200 feet and the pilot requested another descent; however, ATC informed the pilot that they would not have radar contact with the airplane below 5,500 feet. The pilot elected to stay at 5,500 feet and repeated that it was hazy. The final radar data depicted the airplane descending and making a right corkscrew ground track. A witness, who was located in the vicinity of the accident site, heard the sound of a "motor speed up," and heard an aircraft clear a ridge and impact the ground. After the impact, he saw the "flash of a fire ball." The witness added that it was "too foggy" to see the airplane. According to local residents, the weather was foggy and misty at the time of the accident. The airplane's outboard wing sections separated in overload and came to rest in trees on the north side of a ridge. The fuselage impacted trees and terrain on the south side of the ridge approximately 0.2 miles from the outboard wing sections. Its measured descent angle was 50 degrees. All of the control cable and structural separations were consistent with an overload failure. It is unknown how much, if any, instrument or simulated instrument flight time the pilot had accumulated. Metabolites of cocaine were found in the pilot's muscle tissue; however, it could not be determined when the pilot may have used cocaine.
Probable cause
the pilot's continued VFR flight into IMC, which resulted in spatial disorientation and the ensuing loss of aircraft control while in cruise flight. Contributory factors were the haze and fog weather conditions.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record FTW01FA095
- Event ID
- 20010416X00763
- Case number
- FTW01FA095
- 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, coordinates. 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: f822c924feb56682c210248ea69ca4d15c1885ff724805787b5327849648553d; retrieved 2026-09-20T20:36:12.865Z.