NYC07CA204 · Cessna 172
Cessna 172 · Accident: in flight encounter with weather
From Mallory Airport (WV12) to Morgantown Municipal Airport Walter L. (Bill) Hart Field (MGW)
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC07CA204
- 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 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
- N6670A
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Mallory Airport (WV12), Mallory, WVTo Morgantown Municipal Airport Walter L. (Bill) Hart Field (MGW), Morgantown, WV
- 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
- Other
- 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
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Pilot in command › Preflight planning/preparation, inadequate
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 pilot of the Cessna 172 reported that he and a passenger took off in clear skies for an early morning breakfast at an airport about 125 nautical miles to the northeast. Upon reaching the destination, the pilot found he could not descend below a cloud layer, and opted to return to the departure airport. Upon arrival at that airport, it was also covered by a low cloud layer, so the pilot continued to the south, toward rising terrain, to find a suitable airport to land. About 15 miles away, he found a hole in clouds and descended. With continued low ceilings and low fuel, the pilot made a precautionary landing to a field. During the landing roll, the pilot "lost control" of the airplane. The right wingtip struck the ground, then the left main landing gear folded inboard, the nose landing gear collapsed, and the outboard 3 feet of the left wing bent upwards about 30 degrees. The pilot did not obtain a weather briefing or file a flight plan, and no mechanical anomalies were noted with the airplane.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadequate preflight planning. Contributing to the accident were the overcast cloud conditions and the pilot's failure to maintain directional control during the landing roll.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC07CA204
- Event ID
- 20071026X01663
- Case number
- NYC07CA204
- 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: 15eb70536bafdbb2a85a33a72a8736e19487f26b97f326dfa67ac5da983f657b; retrieved 2026-09-21T18:24:57.476Z.