ERA18LA094 · Cessna 172 S
Middle River Aviation Cessna 172 S · Accident: loss of visual reference en route
From Martin State Airport (MTN) to Ocean City Municipal Airport (OXB)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA18LA094
- 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 172 S
- 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
- N615JA
- Operator
- Middle River Aviation
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Martin State Airport (MTN), Baltimore, MDTo Ocean City Municipal Airport (OXB), Ocean City, MD
- Aircraft age
- About 11 years (built 2007)
- 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 · descent
- 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 visual reference
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Destroyed
Cause areas
- Environmental issues › Conditions/weather/phenomena
- Not determined › Not determined
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, not marked as estimated; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The non-instrument-rated private pilot rented the airplane on the day of the accident for a night visual flight rules cross-country flight in visual meteorological conditions. A review of radar track data showed that the airplane initiated a descent from 3,500 ft mean sea level (msl) about 15 nautical miles (nm) from the destination airport; the last recorded radar track data showed the airplane at an altitude of 1,350 ft msl about 3 nm from the destination airport.
The airplane was reported missing the following morning, and an oil slick was subsequently discovered about 2 miles from the end of the runway at the destination airport. Divers located the wreckage; however, it was not recovered, and an examination of the airplane could not be performed.
Sun and moon data revealed that the moon was 98% illuminated about 45 degrees above the horizon to the east about the time of the accident; however, overcast clouds would have obscured its illumination.
The dark night conditions combined with a an approach to the airport over water would have increased the difficulty associated with the tasks of maintaining aircraft attitude control and maintaining awareness of the airplane's height above the water while maneuvering to land. It is likely that the pilot either lost control due to spatial disorientation or inadvertently descended into the water; however, without track information from the final moments of the flight, there is insufficient information from which to determine which scenario was more likely involved in the accident.
Probable cause
The pilot's flight in dark night visual meteorological conditions, which resulted in an impact with water for reasons that could not be determined based on the available information.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA18LA094
- Event ID
- 20180304X41553
- Case number
- ERA18LA094
- 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: local date, investigation status, coordinates. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2018-03-01.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 0ae799ff70f998857721a65695a30440c71d4ff30c5551618ae3191280ce43db; retrieved 2026-09-15T06:35:37.042Z.