SEA07FA199 · Cessna 182S
Cessna 182S · Accident: in flight encounter with weather en route
From Scottsdale Airport (SDL) to Prescott Regional Airport - Ernest A. Love Field (PRC)
Event
- NTSB case
- SEA07FA199
- 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
- Visual Meteorological Cond
Cessna 182S
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 182
- 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
- N2454M
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Scottsdale Airport (SDL), Scottsdale, AZTo Prescott Regional Airport - Ernest A. Love Field (PRC), Prescott, AZ
- 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 › Aircraft control, not maintained
- Pilot in command › VFR flight into imc, inadvertent
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The day prior to the accident, the pilot, who was employed as a flight instructor, flew two instructional flights. Following the last flight, about 1511, the pilot went home to take a nap, as he had only 4 hours sleep the night before. Later that afternoon, the pilot and a passenger flew the airplane to a nearby city to have dinner with the pilot's uncle. They left about 2130 for other social plans. At 0231 to 0234 the following morning, they were videoed entering the security gate at the airport en route to their airplane. Radar data recorded that they departed at 0313 and flew north; the airplane leveled off at 8,500 feet. At 0330, radar contact was lost. There was cloud cover in the accident area with tops approximately 10,000 to 11,000 feet, and the bottoms approximately 5,500 feet msl. There was no moon, and the area around the accident site was sparsely populated with few ground lights. A witness saw a flashing red light come out of the bottom of the clouds. She said she saw the airplane drop twice, and each time saw something like car headlights. The airplane went behind the mesa, and a flash of light was seen. Search and rescue teams found the airplane the following day. Examination of the accident site indicated the airplane impacted the terrain in an estimated 110 degree left bank, with its nose level. Postaccident examination of the wreckage revealed no evidence of preimpact mechanical or airframe discrepancies that would have prevented normal operation. Toxicology tests of the pilot and passenger were positive for volatiles (alcohol); however, due to two day delay in recovering the bodies, it could not be determined if the alcohol was ingested or the result of postmortem decomposition.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadvertent VFR flight into IMC and his ensuing failure to maintain aircraft control while in cruise flight. Contributing factors were the cloudy weather and the dark night conditions.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record SEA07FA199
- Event ID
- 20070723X00983
- Case number
- SEA07FA199
- 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: 1fee846fab3647a93178622d651997f34e58f20aec93cebbdcda49427c67171a; retrieved 2026-09-20T16:28:17.350Z.