FTW03LA056 · Cessna 172M
Cessna 172M · Accident: in flight encounter with weather en route
From Liberal Mid-America Regional Airport (LBL) to Wiley Post Airport (PWA)
Event
- NTSB case
- FTW03LA056
- 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
- Visual Meteorological Cond
Cessna 172M
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 172
- 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
- N4470R
- Operator
- Charles H. Smith · private individual
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Liberal Mid-America Regional Airport (LBL), Liberal, KSTo Wiley Post Airport (PWA), Oklahoma City, OK
- 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
- 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
- Pilot in command › Flight into known adverse weather, performed
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 reported that the flight departed with the weather conditions "light to moderate snow and 5-7 miles visibility." Subsequently, en route the ice accumulated throughout the airframe and he performed an unscheduled landing to remove the ice. After partially removing the ice and checking the weather on the computer, he departed the airport and continued the flight toward the planned destination. Subsequently, in cruise flight, he noted an indicated airspeed of 115 mph, and the flight encountered freezing rain and structural icing, and the indicated airspeed decayed to 80 mph. He decreased the pitch of the airplane to maintain the airspeed at 80 mph and diverted the flight to the nearest airport; however, the airplane was unable to maintain 80 mph, and he elected to perform a precautionary landing to an open field short of the airport. During the landing roll in rough and uneven terrain, the nose gear collapsed, and the airplane nosed-over coming to rest in the inverted position. The nearest weather reporting station, located 30.4 nautical miles east southeast (103 degrees) of the accident site was reporting calm winds, visibility 4 statute miles with freezing rain and haze, few clouds at 1,000 feet, a broken ceiling at 1,500 feet, and overcast at 2,800 feet. The temperature was 28 degrees Fahrenheit, and the dew point was 27 degrees Fahrenheit.
Probable cause
The pilot's departure and continued flight into adverse weather conditions. Contributing factors were the icing conditions, and the lack of suitable terrain for the precautionary landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record FTW03LA056
- Event ID
- 20021204X05559
- Case number
- FTW03LA056
- 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: eecc0cc62dd3bd3aedd259d779247ac604b17b3c511233fa4c8555c3c3b702c3; retrieved 2026-09-22T09:50:38.352Z.