CEN12FA088 · Piper AIRCRAFT, INC. PA-31 Navajo
Piper AIRCRAFT, INC. PA-31 Navajo · Accident en route
From Stephenville Clark Regional Airport (SEP) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN12FA088
- 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
- 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
Piper AIRCRAFT, INC. PA-31 Navajo
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-31
- 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
- N6485L
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Stephenville Clark Regional Airport (SEP), Stephenville, TXTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 42 years (built 1969)
- 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
- Defining eventThe 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
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
- Personnel issues › Physical
- Personnel issues › Psychological
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot became unresponsive and died during cruise flight and the airplane departed controlled flight. The passenger, who had no previous pilot experience, was able to gain control and maneuvered the airplane for a night crash landing at an airport. Witnesses at the airport observed the lights of the airplane moving erratically and saw it impact the runway, strike several obstructions, and come to rest upright in a grassy area next to the runway. An emergency medical team was unable to resuscitate the pilot and he was declared deceased. The postaccident examination of the airframe and engine revealed no evidence of mechanical malfunctions or failures that would have precluded normal operation.
The pilot had severe cardiac disease and was using medications to treat both hypertension and coronary artery disease. These were medical conditions about which he misled the Federal Aviation Administration and would have been disqualifying for a pilot medical certificate. In addition, based on the toxicology testing, the pilot was using methamphetamine at the time of the crash. Methamphetamine acutely causes increased heart rate and elevated blood pressure which increases myocardial oxygen demand. It may also directly cause coronary vasospasm. It is very likely that both the pilot's severe coronary artery disease and acute methamphetamine intoxication contributed to the pilot's sudden cardiac death during flight.
Probable cause
The pilot's fatal cardiac event, which resulted in the inflight loss of control of the airplane. Contributing to the accident was the pilot's use of impairing medications and operation of the airplane with disqualifying medical conditions.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN12FA088
- Event ID
- 20111129X24104
- Case number
- CEN12FA088
- Dataset
- full-current
- Source SHA-256
- 5cf380f0061817c0331a6b2d8cc7e0ee3a79bea469a1001dc5c10e56f35f5ab3
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: local date, investigation status, coordinates. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2011-11-30.
- API snapshot SHA-256: abea0c14271884e7cc666bfdd6a2134d5a65e3a90baca0b39a906b480b2dddfa; retrieved 2026-09-13T22:00:54.238Z.