DEN06LA036 · Cessna 172C
Cessna 172C · Accident: in flight encounter with weather en route
From Las Vegas Municipal Airport (LVS) to 2V1 · Pagosa Springs, CO
Event
- NTSB case
- DEN06LA036
- 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
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
Cessna 172C
- 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
- N1407Y
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Las Vegas Municipal Airport (LVS), Las Vegas, NMTo 2V1 · Pagosa Springs, CO
- 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)
- 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, initiated
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
Prior to departure, the pilot discussed the weather with a friend who was 65 miles south of the pilot's intended destination. He told the pilot that the weather was clear to the north. The pilot took off and followed a highway. Poor weather conditions prevented him from landing at his original destination, so he turned around and landed at a privately-owned airport that had no service facilities. Shortly thereafter, the pilot took off again and flew north towards his destination. A nearby New Mexico State trooper on patrol observed a single-engine, high-wing airplane, white in color, pass overhead "not more than 20 feet off the ground." As the pilot got closer to his destination, the "weather got bad." He didn't have enough fuel to divert, so he elected to "fly to area of VFR minimums." Then, the "weather in front of us was below class G minimums," so the pilot decided to make a precautionary landing on a snow-covered road. The road came to a "T" and the airplane slid off the end. The left wing and propeller struck the ground and the right wing struck a tree. The right wing had leading edge compression damage outboard of the root, and the left wing leading edge was crushed near the wing tip fairing. Both propeller blades were bent. The pilot said he "should have picked a spot to do a precautionary landing sooner before the weather got bad. Second, I should have called flight service to get a weather briefing, not a friend."
Probable cause
the pilot initiating flight into known adverse weather, and his delay in not taking remedial action sooner by not making a precautionary landing. Contributing factors include the pilot's failure to obtain preflight and in-flight weather briefings, his continuing VFR flight into IMC, snow-covered terrain, and trees.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DEN06LA036
- Event ID
- 20060131X00139
- Case number
- DEN06LA036
- 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. 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: 640403116fd259b0d1d3551df0cb48adfdc2c99e1bd73c349b03f940645f0a46; retrieved 2026-09-22T05:08:33.440Z.