DFW07FA019 · Cessna 172S
Cessna 172S · Accident: in flight collision with terrain/water en route
From Tulsa International Airport (KTUL) to Wichita Dwight D. Eisenhower National Airport (KICT)
Event
- NTSB case
- DFW07FA019
- 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
- 0
- 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 172S
- 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
- N53443
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Tulsa International Airport (KTUL), Tulsa, OKTo Wichita Dwight D. Eisenhower National Airport (KICT), Wichita, KS
- 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 › Altitude/clearance, not maintained
- Pilot in command › Flight into adverse weather, continued
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
Dark night instrument conditions prevailed throughout the area when the non-instrument rated private pilot elected to initiate the 114-nautical mile cross-country flight to his home station. There were no witnesses to the accident. The moon illumination on the night of the accident was reported as full moon; however, there was an overcast sky, and visibility was reduced due to rain and the cloud layer. Additionally, the unpopulated terrain over the route of flight provided little illumination for ground references. Search and rescue operations were hampered due to IFR conditions in the area, and the wreckage was not located for 4 hours and 29 minutes following the accident. The investigation revealed that the pilot had accumulated a total of 4.1 hours of night time, and 4.0 hours of simulated instrument time. The single-engine airplane impacted the ground on a heading of 240-degrees, coming to rest in inverted, 501-feet from the initial impact point. Ground scars, and damage sustained by the airframe, were consistent with the airplane impacting the ground in the cruise configuration in a near level flight attitude. The flaps were found in the fully retracted position. No anomalies were found with the airframe or the engine that could have prevented normal flight operations. Flight and engine control continuity was established at the accident site.
Probable cause
The pilot's continued cruise flight into adverse weather conditions, and his failure to maintain clearance from terrain. Contributing factors were the dark night conditions, and the low ceilings.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DFW07FA019
- Event ID
- 20061109X01633
- Case number
- DFW07FA019
- 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: 1ed74872a74222050483715f4a469148a725594c0a50125f0a7904fa73730510; retrieved 2026-09-20T17:00:15.175Z.