CEN14IA139 · Cirrus Design Corp SR22
Cirrus Design Corp SR22 · Incident: structural icing en route
From Centennial Airport (APA) to Colorado City Municipal Airport (AZC)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN14IA139
- 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
- Incident
- 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
Cirrus Design Corp SR22
- Aircraft type
- Cirrus SR22
- 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
- N18DN
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Centennial Airport (APA), Denver, COTo Colorado City Municipal Airport (AZC), Colorado City, AZ
- Aircraft age
- About 13 years (built 2001)
- 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
- Structural icing
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Minor
Cause areas
- Environmental issues › Conditions/weather/phenomena
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
About 90 minutes before the flight, the pilot received a preflight weather briefing, which included an advisory for moderate icing between the freezing level (expected to be at or below 10,000 ft mean sea level [msl]) and 22,000 ft msl. The pilot reported that the airplane encountered instrument meteorological conditions with light icing accumulation about 45 minutes into the flight. The pilot advised an air traffic controller of the situation when the airplane was operating about 15,900 ft msl; however, before he had decided on an alternate route of flight, the icing conditions worsened, and the airplane was unable to maintain altitude. The controller noted that this was the first icing report in that vicinity although there had been earlier reports of light to moderate icing about 50 miles west of the airplane's position. Unsure of the height of the cloud bases in relation to the mountainous terrain below the airplane's flightpath, the pilot chose to deploy the parachute system. The airplane impacted a mountainside in about 10 ft of snow at an elevation of 11,000 ft msl. The pilot reported no preincident failures or malfunctions with the airplane that would have precluded normal operation. Available weather data at the time of the accident indicated that the freezing level was about 10,000 ft msl with clouds tops about 18,000 ft msl around the incident site.
Probable cause
The pilot's improper decision to initiate the flight into an area with forecast icing conditions, which resulted in an encounter with in-flight icing conditions that prevented the airplane from being able to maintain altitude.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN14IA139
- Event ID
- 20140215X55745
- Case number
- CEN14IA139
- 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: d2007f4584aaed621700669780d01898e68d44b31916eef7006f65d5f6b0f5cb; retrieved 2026-09-15T23:19:22.858Z.