IAD03FA004 · Cessna 182S
Cessna 182S · Accident: in flight collision with terrain/water en route
From Caribou Municipal Airport (CAR) to Central Maine/Norridgewock Airport (OWK)
Event
- NTSB case
- IAD03FA004
- 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 182S
- 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
- N100TY
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Caribou Municipal Airport (CAR), Caribou, METo Central Maine/Norridgewock Airport (OWK), Norridgewock, ME
- 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 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 › Altitude/clearance, not maintained
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot departed on a cross country flight at night, into an area of mountainous terrain. Prior to departure, the pilot's student, who remained behind, expressed his concern about the marginal weather conditions, and told the pilot to watch out for a 5,268-foot mountain located along the route of flight. The student pilot was also concerned because he knew the pilot liked to fly at lower altitudes, between 2,000 and 3,000 feet. Approximately 40 minutes after departure, the airplane collided with a 2,630-foot mountain at the 2,575-foot level. Weather, reported at an airport about 20 nautical miles to the northeast of the accident site, included a scattered cloud layer at 3,200 feet and an overcast cloud layer at 4,300 feet.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain sufficient altitude while flying in mountainous terrain at night. A factor was the night lighting conditions.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record IAD03FA004
- Event ID
- 20021031X05413
- Case number
- IAD03FA004
- 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 2002-10-12.
- API snapshot SHA-256: e99c9a0a7b6b8ab0497d9e527f0ef796f3e93085d69f9a711134dcc208a2dcd0; retrieved 2026-09-20T19:44:12.672Z.