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Controlled flight into terrain

Type of aviation accident

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJul 28, 2026
Entity authoritySource title only
Source-derived summary

In aviation, a controlled flight into terrain is an accident in which an airworthy aircraft, fully under pilot control, is unintentionally flown into the ground, a body of water or other obstacle. In a typical CFIT scenario, the crew is unaware of the impending collision until impact, or it is too late to avert. The term was coined by engineers at Boeing in the late 1970s.

Editorial summary

“Controlled flight into terrain” enters the record as type of aviation accident. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Controlled, flight and terrain can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current 66-word lead offers orientation but no explicit four-digit date, so chronology should not be assumed. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Controlled, flight and terrain.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Controlled flight into terrain” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Controlled, flight and terrain provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 28, 2026.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

Best used for
  • Subject orientation
  • Search vocabulary
  • Locating named sources
Verify next

The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Controlled flight into terrain”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Controlled flight into terrain primary sources, Controlled flight into terrain archive and Controlled research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Controlled flight into terrain”?
  2. Which cited source is closest to the event, object or claim?
  3. Which institution is responsible for the underlying evidence?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Controlled flight into terrain” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.