MIA02LA031 · Cessna 172M
Cessna 172M · Accident: loss of control in flight while maneuvering
From Fernando Luis Ribas Dominicci Airport (SIG) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- MIA02LA031
- 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
- Unknown
- 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 172M
- 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
- N61582
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Fernando Luis Ribas Dominicci Airport (SIG), San Juan, PRTo 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
- Maneuvering
- 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
- Loss of control in flight
- 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 › Aircraft control, not maintained
- Pilot in command › Impairment(alcohol)
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot stated that he was performing left turns at an altitude of 900 feet, and when he tried to correct for a left bank, he was unable to do so. He said he was able to make pitch control changes, but was unable to recover from the left bank because the control had jammed. He said that the aircraft then entered a spin, and descended, crashing upside down into a lake. According to an FAA inspector who conducted the postcrash investigation, when he interviewed the pilot, the pilot said that the aircraft was at an altitude of about 700 to 900 feet, and his passenger who was seated in the front next to him, was asleep. The inspector said that the pilot further stated that during attempts to apply a control input to stop the left turn, the control yoke became jammed. The inspector said his examination of the accident aircraft showed that the impact had separated the wings from the rest of the fuselage, but that the flight control system exhibited damage consistent with overstress, and there was no evidence of any preaccident mechanical malfunction to the flight control system. Information provided by law enforcement officials showed that an aircraft had been observed at 200 feet, operating in an area consistent with where the accident aircraft was later found, and that the pilot exhibited a strong odor of alcohol, but refused requests that he submit to an alcohol test.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain control of the aircraft which resulted in an uncontrolled descent and an in flight collision with water. Contributing to the accident was the impairment of the pilot due to alcohol.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record MIA02LA031
- Event ID
- 20011204X02346
- Case number
- MIA02LA031
- 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: 0108d016ab69843385ada315db001c8ce722bdd4ee475fab03dce708a85d3b0d; retrieved 2026-09-21T19:48:40.573Z.