CEN12LA532 · Cessna 177B
Cessna 177B · Accident: loss of control in flight en route
From Stuart Powell Field (DVK) to Evansville, IN
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN12LA532
- 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
- Visual Meteorological Cond
Cessna 177B
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 177
- 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
- N34283
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Stuart Powell Field (DVK), Danville, KYTo Evansville, IN
- 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
- Defining eventThe 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
- Loss of control in flight
- 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
- Aircraft › Aircraft systems
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot reported a loss of attitude reference and a subsequent loss of control during cruise flight in instrument meteorological conditions. About 15 minutes into the flight, the attitude indicator displayed a 30-degree right bank and the pilot’s control inputs did not seem to correct the banked condition. The pilot subsequently noticed a 2,000 foot-per-minute descent with increasing airspeed. The attitude indicator and turn coordinator were displaying conflicting information, and the directional gyro was indicating a rapid heading change to the left. About 5,000 feet mean sea level, the airplane broke out of the clouds, and the pilot was able to regain control and landed without further incident. The pilot observed substantial damage to the wings after landing.
A postaccident examination of the attitude indicator revealed significant noise during testing, consistent with an impending gyro bearing failure. In addition, after the gyro was allowed to reach operating speed, it did not fully stabilize again after it was disturbed from equilibrium. Postaccident examination of the vacuum pump and airframe vacuum system did not reveal any anomalies.
Probable cause
The pilot’s loss of control due to an inaccurate attitude reference, which was caused by an impending (“in process”) failure of the bearing in the attitude indicator.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN12LA532
- Event ID
- 20120809X23409
- Case number
- CEN12LA532
- Dataset
- full-current
- Source SHA-256
- 5cf380f0061817c0331a6b2d8cc7e0ee3a79bea469a1001dc5c10e56f35f5ab3
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: 72f5f3a8e4e2a129afaa6815863249521fdc44073b7b1ef5a736d5d2aa7d86f9; retrieved 2026-09-15T19:17:26.494Z.