MIA95LA032 · Cessna 172D
Cessna 172D · Accident en route
From Miami-Opa Locka Executive Airport (OPF) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- MIA95LA032
- 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
- 0
- 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 172D
- 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
- N707PP
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Miami-Opa Locka Executive Airport (OPF), OPA LOCKA, FLTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- Not recorded
- 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
- First occurrenceThe 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
- Miscellaneous/other
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- None
Cause areas
- Passenger › Suicide, intentional
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot reported that he was in cruise flight at 5,000 feet agl and had slowed to 70 mph. The passenger stated that she was taking off her headset and moving her seat back so she could get a good photograph. The pilot heard what sounded like a yell, and simultaneously felt wind and noise in the cabin. He looked towards the sound, and observed the passenger partially out of the airplane. When their eyes met, she jumped. Review of ATC transcripts verified that the pilot departed and returned to the departure airport without any intermediate stops. Another pilot wrote a letter to the Safety Board describing a similar incident that occurred 4 days prior to the accident with the same passenger. During that flight, she unlatched the door gunner's safety belt while sitting on the floor with her feet outside the airplane on the landing gear. At the time, she was wearing a parachute with a hidden automatic opener on the reserve parachute. She was subsequently pulled back into the airplane by a safety crewmember and restrained for the return flight. The passenger's airman and medical certificates had been revoked 8/12/91 for failing to disclose a history of, among other conditions, a personality disorder and for the taking of numerous prescribed medications.
Probable cause
The passenger committed suicide.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record MIA95LA032
- Event ID
- 20001206X02766
- Case number
- MIA95LA032
- Dataset
- historical-pre2008
- Source SHA-256
- 89e2df6d848e7ab3b42e7d7c7a03ff403303057a26ca04c95b3ea67201c3ce74
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, damage. 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: 009c2835f238f5bbf9549dee4fed7bc913d5617893dce43b8d401948e1a5429a; retrieved 2026-09-20T23:55:22.448Z.