Air Sunshine Cessna 402C accident
Cessna 402C · Accident: in flight collision with terrain/water en route
From Henry E. Rohlsen Airport (STX) to Cyril E. King Airport (STT)
Event
- NTSB case
- MIA97FA082
- 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
- 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
- Charter & commuter
- 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 402C
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 402
- 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
- N318AB
- Operator
- Air Sunshine
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Henry E. Rohlsen Airport (STX), ST. CROIXTo Cyril E. King Airport (STT)
- 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 135: Air Taxi & Commuter
- 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
- 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
- In flight collision with terrain/water
- 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
- Faa(organization) › Inadequate surveillance of operation
- Pilot in command › Altimeter, not used
- Pilot in command › Descent, inadvertent
- Pilot in command › VFR procedures, inadequate
- Pilot in command › Visual illusion
Not plotted · Location withheld: coordinates are missing, conflicting, invalid, or have no accepted acquisition method. No substitute location has been invented.
NTSB narrative
As the flight made a visual approach to the airport from the south over the sea, at night, the pilot changed his navigation radio from the VOR to the ILS system for runway 10 and lost DME reading from the VOR located on a hill north of the localizer course. The localizer showed the flight was south of the localizer course, and without DME from the VOR the pilot believed he was much closer to the island and the airport than the aircraft actually was. As the pilot attempted to make visual contact with the airport and maintain clearance from the hills he allowed the aircraft to descend and crash into the sea about 3 miles southwest of the airport. The pilot had not filed a FAA flight plan for the scheduled commuter flight. The pilot had been flying the route for 5 days and had no previous experience in the area. The pilot reported he had no mechanical malfunctions with the aircraft systems, flight controls, or engines. No FAA Operations inspectors had conducted surveillance on the company's flight operations in the Caribbean since service had begun in December 1996.
Probable cause
The failure of the pilot to maintain altitude while making a visual approach at night over water in black hole conditions resulting in the aircraft descending and crashing into the sea. Contributing to the accident was the failure of the pilot and operator to use all available air traffic control and navigational facilities, and the FAA Principle Operations Inspector's inadequate surveillance of the operation.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record MIA97FA082
- Event ID
- 20001208X07433
- Case number
- MIA97FA082
- 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: cf51a56f7fdf3e64865fb943e25258065979f9cc035b925065bff716c4fc7ea9; retrieved 2026-09-18T13:30:48.551Z.