ATL03FA075 · Cessna 180
Cessna 180 · Accident: in flight encounter with weather en route
From Thomasville Regional Airport (TVI) to Southwest Alabama Medical Center Heliport (AL48)
Narrative check · The NTSB narrative appears to contradict this record's departure or destination. Values are shown as recorded, not corrected; compare with the narrative.
Event
- NTSB case
- ATL03FA075
- 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
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
Cessna 180
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 180
- 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
- N3166D
- Operator
- William Sumner Humphrey
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route Possible conflict
- From Thomasville Regional Airport (TVI), Thomasville, GATo Southwest Alabama Medical Center Heliport (AL48), Thomasville, AL
- 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
- Also codedOther events the NTSB coded in the sequence, such as a wire strike after a loss of power. Flight Findings uses them for its kinds of event. Glossary
- Visual flight rules (VFR) flight into instrument meteorological conditions (IMC); Tree(s)
- 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 › Clearance, not maintained
- Pilot in command › VFR flight into imc, continued
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
According to the Macon Automated Flight Service Station (AFSS), the private pilot called in to get a weather briefing on the conditions from Thomasville, Georgia, to Detroit, Michigan. The pilot informed Macon AFSS that he was aware of the "swirling mess" and wondered how far west he would have to fly in order to avoid it. At 1438, the Macon AFSS advised the pilot that the lowest cloud conditions between Thomasville, Georgia, and Gadsden, Alabama were twelve hundred feet, and that the observation was twenty-three minutes old. The current observation showed that the weather conditions were beginning to deteriorate and that the ceiling dropped two hundred feet. A witness reported, on April 10, 2003 between 1630 and 1700 central standard time, a high wing; tail wheel type airplane flew over their home. The witness recalled the weather consisted of low clouds, rain and fog. There were several pilot reports recorded within a 60-mile radius surrounding the time of the accident. All of the reports were identified with pilot's operating under instrument flight rules. The pilot reports were consistent with the base of the overcast layer at 1,500 feel mean sea level with varying tops from 5500 feet west over Birmingham to 11,500 feet west of Atlanta. On April 11, 2003, at 1045 CST, a hiker in the Cheaha State Park discovered the wreckage of the downed airplane along a hiking trail at approximately the 1800 foot level of Hernandez Peak. Local authorities found the private pilot was seated in the right front seat, and the student pilot seated in the left front seat.
Probable cause
The pilot's continued VFR flight into IMC conditions and his failure to maintain obstacle clearance. A factor was low ceilings.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ATL03FA075
- Event ID
- 20030416X00524
- Case number
- ATL03FA075
- 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: 785447f77157323b80c5be58e1003908e0c8094488c248281bd0ad0f267679e1; retrieved 2026-09-20T19:19:17.259Z.