CHI03FAMS1 · Cessna 175
Cessna 175 · Accident: missing aircraft
From Fond du Lac County Airport (FLD) to Beaver Island, MI
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI03FAMS1
- 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
- Visual Meteorological Cond
Cessna 175
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 175
- 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
- N7091M
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Fond du Lac County Airport (FLD), Fond Du Lac, WITo Beaver Island, MI
- 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
- Unknown
- 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
- Missing aircraft
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Substantial
Cause areas
No findings designated as a cause are recorded in the NTSB data yet.
Not plotted · Location withheld: coordinates are missing, conflicting, invalid, or have no accepted acquisition method. No substitute location has been invented.
NTSB narrative
The airplane is missing. The airplane has not been located. The pilot is missing. The passenger's body was located in Lake Michigan almost a month after the accident. The last known departure point was Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. According to information provided in a flight service station briefing earlier in the day, the final destination for the flight was Beaver Island, Michigan. The last radar data on the airplane was over Lake Michigan south of Fairport, Michigan. The Coast Guard and the Civil Air Patrol searched for the airplane to no avail. Two AIRMETS were valid for the area of the last radar contact. One AIRMET warned of occasional low overcast ceilings less than 1,000 feet and visibility below 3 miles in stratus, precipitation, and mist. The other AIRMET warned of occasional moderate rime or mixed icing in clouds and in precipitation above the freezing level to 20,000 feet. The freezing level was identified near 4,000 feet over the northwest portion of the advisory area and rose to near 12,000 feet over the southern portion of the region.
Probable cause
Undetermined. Missing aircraft.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI03FAMS1
- Event ID
- 20021118X05474
- Case number
- CHI03FAMS1
- 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 2002-11-11.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 50ff6653cc614277e090890c555a70ff2df073e18c226f789e39ae4cb939f91c; retrieved 2026-09-20T19:41:13.467Z.