WPR23LA204 · Cessna 175A
Cessna 175A · Accident: loss of lift during initial climb
From Mackie Ranch Airport (UT91) to North Las Vegas Airport (KVGT)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR23LA204
- 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
- Event fatalities
- Unknown
- 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 175A
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 175
- 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
- N5089
- Operator
- Gifford David M
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Mackie Ranch Airport (UT91), Enterprise, UTTo North Las Vegas Airport (KVGT), Las Vegas, NV
- Aircraft age
- About 63 years (built 1960)
- 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
- Initial climb
- 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 lift
- 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 oper/perf/capability
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane departed a private dirt strip in mountainous terrain with a left quartering headwind. During the initial climb, the pilot retracted the flaps from to 20º to 10º to improve the airplane’s acceleration. There was no change in airspeed, so he retracted the flaps completely and the airplane began a descent. He then extended the flaps back to 10º and initiated a shallow right turn to maneuver away from rising terrain, but the airplane did not climb. The pilot applied a nose down attitude to prevent a stall and the airplane impacted terrain and nosed over, in which the right wing sustained substantial damage. The pilot suspected he had flown into a downdraft after taking off and reported there were no mechanical failures or malfunctions to the airplane or engine that would have precluded normal operation.
Probable cause
The pilot’s inability to maintain altitude during an initial climbout in mountainous terrain after encountering a suspected downdraft.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR23LA204
- Event ID
- 20230531192268
- Case number
- WPR23LA204
- 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, cause areas. 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: f2673b8896fb164c523b4ebe5ab0cc5e3f207933213f357289f3b9d63fbe8042; retrieved 2026-09-16T17:39:29.490Z.