MIA98LA031 · de Havilland DHC-6-6
Emerald Coast Skydiving Center de Havilland DHC-6-6 · Accident while standing
From 7J9 to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- MIA98LA031
- 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
- 1
- 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
de Havilland DHC-6-6
- Aircraft type
- de Havilland DHC-6
- 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
- N1022S
- Operator
- Emerald Coast Skydiving Center
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From 7J9To 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
- Standing · engine(s) operating
- 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
- Minor
Cause areas
- Passenger › Propeller/jet blast encounter, inadvertent
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
During the loading of 17 parachutists, a 31-year-old male parachutist notified the loader/jump master that on his next jump he would have a smoke canister on the airplane and that the pilot should be notified. The loader/jump master told him, '...that to notify the pilot would be his (the loader's) job, that he [the parachutist] was just to board the aircraft.' The loader started boarding the jumpers and he went forward to give the pilot the information. The loader/jump master said, '...disregarding [his] the loaders instructions the subject walked from the rear left area and proceeded straight to the cockpit door where the loader and pilot were. In spite of several people hollering at him the subject walked into the left side engine propeller....'
Probable cause
a passenger's inadvertent encounter with a rotating propeller.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record MIA98LA031
- Event ID
- 20001208X09227
- Case number
- MIA98LA031
- 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: a1bad32cd3dd55bd36cad8dcf47d1ed6722ab64489ad5acf4b105c3fb8d69146; retrieved 2026-09-20T22:45:48.921Z.