SEA07FA012 · Cessna 172M
Cessna 172M · Accident: in flight encounter with weather en route
From Falcon Field (FFZ) to Provo Municipal Airport (PVU)
Event
- NTSB case
- SEA07FA012
- 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 172M
- 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
- N9179D
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Falcon Field (FFZ), Mesa, AZTo Provo Municipal Airport (PVU), Provo, 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 encounter with weather
- 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 › Aircraft control, not maintained
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot departed for a night positioning cross-country flight over very sparsely populated country. The flight progressed into a weather frontal system with light to heavy rain. Radar data and an onboard handheld GPS receiver show the aircraft spiraling to the left and accelerating to a high rate of speed until impact. The following morning, a helicopter was sent to the last radar return, and found the downed aircraft. It was fragmented, and the engine was found 1,200 feet from its initial impact point. The pilot had approximately 480 hours of flight experience, with no actual instrument-meteorological-condition (IMC) flying experience. He had approximately 15 hours of night flying, most of which was flown between 22 to 24 months before the accident flight. The postaccident examination of the airframe and engine revealed no preimpact anomalies which might have affected the airplane's flight performance.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain aircraft control. Contributing factors were the pilot's lack of experience of flying on instruments on a dark night and in rainy weather.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record SEA07FA012
- Event ID
- 20061109X01635
- Case number
- SEA07FA012
- 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 2006-10-25.
- API snapshot SHA-256: e48ba3f9be81bca0bbb580f53a1a81fb7e2b28446ccefa9473c93dd8451366bb; retrieved 2026-09-20T17:00:59.372Z.