ANC05FA037 · Cessna 172
Ocala Aviation Services Cessna 172 · Accident: in flight encounter with weather while maneuvering
From Ocala International Airport - Jim Taylor Field (KOCF) to Shell Creek Airpark (F13)
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC05FA037
- 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
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
Cessna 172
- 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
- N739NK
- Operator
- Ocala Aviation Services
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Ocala International Airport - Jim Taylor Field (KOCF), Ocala, FLTo Shell Creek Airpark (F13), Punta Gorda, FL
- 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
- Maneuvering
- 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); Stall
- 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 › Airspeed, 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
The non-instrument rated private pilot departed on a cross-country, 14 CFR Part 91 personal flight in a rented airplane. According to the operator who rented the airplane to the pilot, the pilot told him that he was planning to fly to a community about 135 miles south of the departure airport and return. About two hours after the airplane had departed, residents of a coastal community about 43 miles west of the departure airport, reported hearing a low flying airplane. All consistently stated that at the time of the accident, low clouds and fog substantially reduced visibility. One witness, a private pilot, said he saw the airplane fly out of a fog bank, about 20 feet above the water, over the tidal bay waters next to his home. He said it was headed towards a set of power lines that stretched across the bay, and just before the airplane struck the power lines, it pitched up abruptly and climbed over the power lines. After the airplane had cleared the power lines, he said it stalled, with the nose of the airplane dropping abruptly. The airplane subsequently collided with shallow tidal water and a dock in a nose down attitude.
Probable cause
The pilot's continued flight into instrument meteorological conditions (IMC), and his failure to maintain adequate airspeed during an abrupt maneuver to avoid a power line, which resulted in an inadvertent stall, a loss of control, and subsequent collision with terrain-water. Factors associated with the accident were low a ceiling, fog, a transmission wire, and an inadvertent stall.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC05FA037
- Event ID
- 20050225X00233
- Case number
- ANC05FA037
- 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: 204a7dbe507050373ada2a21a7a08c368ae4550ff3c7f19948823ff73b6a8546; retrieved 2026-09-20T18:06:45.642Z.