CHI02FA172 · Cessna 182A
Cessna 182A · Accident: in flight collision with terrain/water during an uncontrolled descent
From Gogebic Iron County Airport (IWD) to UNKNOWN
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI02FA172
- 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
- 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
- Visual 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
- N5034D
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Gogebic Iron County Airport (IWD), Ironwood, MITo UNKNOWN
- 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
- Uncontrolled 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 collision with terrain/water
- 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 › Incapacitation(cardiovascular)
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 was reported missing and later found destroyed in a wooded area by search and rescue personnel. The wreckage path was consistent with a high-speed descent into terrain. Examination of the wreckage revealed no anomalies. The pilot had multiple serious medical conditions, several of which are specified as disqualifying for all classes of medical certificate in Federal Aviation Regulations including a thinned bulging section of heart wall, congestive heart failure, cardiac chest pain, coronary heart disease requiring angioplasty and bypass surgery complicated by atrial fibrillation and diabetes requiring insulin and oral hypoglycemic mediation. He also had significant disease of his heart valves. The pilot and his personal physician (also his Aviation Medical Examiner for many years) had not informed the Federal Aviation Administration regarding the pilot's conditions (known to the pilot and the Aviation Medical Examiner at the time of application), on seven applications for Airman Medical Certificates.
Probable cause
The incapacitation of the pilot. A contributing factor was the pilot and medical examiner providing false information on the pilot's medical applications.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI02FA172
- Event ID
- 20020627X00987
- Case number
- CHI02FA172
- 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: ef1b0809ffd5e6d56f4eb65c63bf5625b3ee883cc0d70f710eba21387a969577; retrieved 2026-09-20T19:59:33.895Z.