CEN15FA119 · Cessna 182L
Cessna 182L · Accident: structural icing en route
From Menominee–Marinette Twin County Airport (MNM) to Litchfield Municipal Airport (LJF)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN15FA119
- 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 182L
- 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
- N3181R
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Menominee–Marinette Twin County Airport (MNM), Menominee, MITo Litchfield Municipal Airport (LJF), Litchfield, MN
- Aircraft age
- About 48 years (built 1967)
- 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
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The accident occurred on the third leg of a multi-leg cross-county trip that the flight instructor and the student pilot were making to relocate the airplane, which the student pilot had recently purchased. The flight instructor stated that, before beginning the flight, he obtained a weather briefing indicating icing conditions along the route of flight, but he thought they would be able to get above the weather. Although the airplane was not certified or equipped to fly into icing conditions, the flight instructor elected to initiate the flight. While en route, the airplane accumulated airframe ice despite the flight instructor making several altitude changes in an attempt to reach warmer temperatures. The airplane eventually accumulated enough ice that it was no longer capable of maintaining altitude, which resulted in the flight instructor making an off-airport emergency landing on a country road. The airplane's windshield was iced over restricting the pilot's forward visibility, and during the landing roll, the airplane contacted trees. A postaccident examination of the airplane at the accident site revealed the presence of rime ice on the top and bottom wing surfaces. Additionally, several pieces of concave-shaped ice ranging from 1.5-inches- to 7-inches-long and from 1.5-inches- to 2-inches-wide were located around the accident site. An examination of the airframe and engine did not reveal any anomalies that would have prevented normal operation.
Probable cause
The flight instructor's decision to initiate flight into forecasted icing conditions in an airplane that was not certified or equipped for flight into icing conditions, which resulted in significant structural ice accumulation to the extent that the airplane was unable to maintain altitude.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN15FA119
- Event ID
- 20150126X31505
- Case number
- CEN15FA119
- 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: b7270a5fd1f99d04ef3486645b792de7e7c89f4cdc250ee5ddac7d38c5130ee7; retrieved 2026-09-14T17:31:29.422Z.