SEA96FA071 · Cessna U206E
Cessna U206E · Accident en route
From Renton Municipal Airport (RNT) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- SEA96FA071
- 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
- 0 · 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 U206E
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 206
- 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
- N1460M
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Renton Municipal Airport (RNT)To 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
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Pilot in command › Incapacitation(cardiovascular)
- Pilot in command › Procedures/directives, not followed
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot became incapacitated in flight, requiring his non-pilot passenger to take the controls. The passenger contacted the air traffic control tower at Renton, Washington and requested assistance. A Renton tower controller, who was also a certificated flight instructor, then 'talked the passenger down' to a landing at Renton. The passenger landed the floatplane hard on the airport's paved runway, substantially damaging the aircraft. The pilot was pronounced dead at the scene. An FAA second-class medical certificate, dated November 21, 1994, was found in the pilot's personal effects at the scene. An autopsy attributed the pilot's death to 'severe arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease' and classified the manner of his death as natural. The pilot indicated on his application for his medical certificate, dated November 18, 1994, that he had no history of heart or vascular trouble. However, medical records on file at two Seattle-area hospitals documented that the pilot had been admitted to those hospitals in 1991 with diagnoses of myocardial infarction and coronary artery disease, both disqualifying conditions for a second-class medical certificate per Federal Aviation Regulations.
Probable cause
the pilot's initiation of a flight with a known disqualifying heart condition, and his subsequent inflight incapacitation from a heart attack. A factor relating to the accident was: the inability of the non-rated passenger (unqualified person) to attain a successful landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record SEA96FA071
- Event ID
- 20001208X05479
- Case number
- SEA96FA071
- 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. 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: f6f155ed7144f317d841876b1dd7c24c3962960d886ca40c6e5a6f1b16649fca; retrieved 2026-09-21T21:56:43.704Z.