ERA12LA578 · Cessna 172B
Cessna 172B · Accident: controlled flight into terrain/object (CFIT) while maneuvering
From Herlong Airport (HEG) to UNKNOWN
Narrative check · The NTSB narrative appears to contradict this record's location. Values are shown as recorded, not corrected; compare with the narrative.
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA12LA578
- 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
Cessna 172B
- 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
- N8059X
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Herlong Airport (HEG), Jacksonville, FLTo UNKNOWN
- 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
- 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
- Controlled flight into terrain/object (CFIT)
- 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
- Personnel issues › Miscellaneous
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot had been experiencing difficulties in his personal life and had joked with a clergyman about 2 days before the accident that he should, “just fly his plane into the ocean.” The pilot was subsequently reported missing. The investigation revealed that he arrived at the airport where his airplane was kept about 2 o’clock in the morning the day of the accident. Radar data showed that a primary radar target departed the airport vicinity about 45 minutes later and flew east. After a brief period of maneuvering over the open ocean about 21 nautical miles from shore, radar contact with the target was lost. A portion of airplane wreckage was recovered from the ocean later that day by a commercial diving vessel and was subsequently identified as being of the same make, model, and vintage as the accident airplane. No further wreckage was recovered, nor were the remains of the pilot. A hand-written suicide note was found inside the pilot’s vehicle, which was parked in the airplane’s hangar.
Probable cause
The pilot’s suicidal act.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA12LA578
- Event ID
- 20120925X95448
- Case number
- ERA12LA578
- 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: 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: 83542c83e8f137038f4699d6cf21ae74070bc0589a776bd6b184c3e3154d615f; retrieved 2026-09-14T15:45:09.835Z.