ERA13FA330 · Cessna 172M
JLS Aviation Cessna 172M · Accident: security/criminal event while maneuvering
From Shannon Airport (EZF) to Shannon Airport (EZF)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA13FA330
- 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 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
- N61954
- Operator
- JLS Aviation
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Shannon Airport (EZF), Fredericksburg, VATo Shannon Airport (EZF), Fredericksburg, VA
- Aircraft age
- About 38 years (built 1975)
- 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
- Security/criminal event
- 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
About 30 minutes before the flight, the pilot reserved the airplane to complete "pattern work." The pilot's fiancée arrived at the airport as the pilot was walking toward the airplane, and, following a brief altercation, the pilot boarded the airplane and took off. About that time, sheriff's deputies arrived at the airport because they had been notified by the pilot's fiancée that she believed the pilot intended to commit suicide. The deputies, fiancée, and flight instructor subsequently observed the airplane maneuver erratically before climbing to an altitude of about 3,000 feet. The airplane then pitched down into a near-vertical descent. The witnesses reported hearing the engine increase to "full" power. The airplane impacted the ground at high speed and then burst into flames. Although the wreckage was significantly fragmented and fire-damaged, no evidence of any preimpact mechanical malfunctions or failures of the airframe or engine that would have precluded normal operation were observed. The pilot had been diagnosed with "severe recurrent major depression" about 7 weeks before the accident and was subsequently prescribed an antidepressant and advised to seek counseling. The medical examiner determined that the manner of death was "suicide." Postmortem toxicological testing of the pilot's remains revealed the presence of ethanol; however, the investigation was unable to determine if preflight ethanol ingestion played a role in pilot's decision-making.
Probable cause
The pilot's intentional descent into the ground to commit suicide.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA13FA330
- Event ID
- 20130722X21859
- Case number
- ERA13FA330
- 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: 2d7101f563f5f3959bc3bec3552f20f52102edca1bb157ef62da8a6cbe40a9ea; retrieved 2026-09-14T16:00:52.941Z.