WPR15LA150 · Cessna 206H
McClelland Aviation Cessna 206H · Accident: controlled flight into terrain/object (CFIT) while maneuvering
From Redding Municipal Airport (RDD) to Redding Municipal Airport (RDD)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR15LA150
- 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 206H
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 206
- 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
- N3535M
- Operator
- McClelland Aviation
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Redding Municipal Airport (RDD), Redding, CATo Redding Municipal Airport (RDD), Redding, CA
- Aircraft age
- About 14 years (built 2001)
- 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
- Destroyed
Cause areas
- Personnel issues › Miscellaneous
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
A witness reported that he saw the airplane climb and then abruptly descend straight down and that it sounded as if the engine was at full power. Radar data indicated that the airplane departed the airport climbing to the east. While still climbing, the airplane made an approximate 360-degree turn. When the airplane reached about 5,500 ft, it descended in a straight line until it impacted the ground. While law enforcement officers were on scene, they received notification of a welfare check on the pilot because he had sent suicidal text messages to friends and family members earlier that morning. The autopsy report determined that the pilot's cause of death was multiple traumatic injuries and blunt force trauma with the manner of death being suicide.
Probable cause
The pilot's intentional descent into terrain.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR15LA150
- Event ID
- 20150418X35909
- Case number
- WPR15LA150
- 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: 4b69b71d2c01a2e138c2b1831dffef90e0f3828e3df2ee7e102b47f4cdf5075c; retrieved 2026-09-14T17:36:21.042Z.