DEN03LA027 · Aircraft Mfg & Dev. Co. (AMD) CH2000
Aircraft Mfg & Dev. Co. (AMD) CH2000 · Accident: in flight collision with terrain/water en route
From Cedar City Regional Airport (CDC) to Delta Municipal Airport (DTA)
Event
- NTSB case
- DEN03LA027
- 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
Aircraft Mfg & Dev. Co. (AMD) CH2000
- Aircraft type
- Aircraft MFG Dev Co (amd) CH2000
- 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
- N8500R
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Cedar City Regional Airport (CDC), Cedar City, UTTo Delta Municipal Airport (DTA), Delta, UT
- 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(cfi) › Altitude, inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The two pilots received an in-person weather briefing from the Flight Service Station at 2000. They said that they would later air-file an IFR flight plan so that they could practice instrument approaches. They departed about 2100. Approximately 2200, the Sheriff's Office received a 9-1-1 cellular telephone call from one of the airplane's occupants, advising that they had crashed, one of the occupants was trapped in the wreckage, and that he was unable to activate the ELT (emergency locator transmitter). Using NTAP (National Track Analysis Program) data from the Air Route Traffic Control Center (ARTCC) and homing in on the cellular telephone signals, the wreckage was located about midnight. The two pilots were airlifted to a hospital in serious condition. One of the pilots told a sheriff's detective that they did not see the mountain. The accident site was at an elevation of about 8,500 feet msl. The Sectional Chart depicted terrain in that area at 8,840 feet msl. The instructor was reportedly "familiar with the area" and did not consult his VFR sectional charts. U.S. Naval Observatory data indicated the Moon's phase was a waning crescent, with 1 percent of the visible disk illuminated.
Probable cause
the inadequate altitude chosen by the flight instructor, resulting in inadequate clearance and subsequent collision with mountainous terrain. Contributing factors were the instructor's failure to consult pertinent VFR sectional charts for the area, and the dark night conditions.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DEN03LA027
- Event ID
- 20030102X00002
- Case number
- DEN03LA027
- 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, coordinates. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2003-01-02.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 1696e588d744d4f2b378062661d4f227f3a6708fa2f36943b2fece0df6b3128e; retrieved 2026-09-21T09:32:13.510Z.