CEN17FA046 · Gordon PEGAZAIR P 100
Gordon PEGAZAIR P 100 · Accident: loss of control in flight en route
From Carmi Municipal Airport (CUL) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN17FA046
- 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
Gordon PEGAZAIR P 100
- Aircraft type
- Gordon PEGAZAIR P 100
- 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
- N129LZ
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Carmi Municipal Airport (CUL), Carmi, ILTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 9 years (built 2007)
- 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
- 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
- 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
- Destroyed
Cause areas
- Aircraft › Aircraft oper/perf/capability
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The 64-year-old pilot, who was the airplane owner, departed on a local personal flight in the airplane about 45 minutes before the accident. Witnesses saw the airplane at 400-500 ft above ground level when it entered a descent, pitched up, rolled right, and then pitched nose down impacting the ground. Ground scarring surrounding the airplane was consistent with a near-vertical nose-down impact attitude, which resulted in the engine separating and coming to rest about 20 ft from the airframe. Postaccident examination of the airplane revealed no evidence of any mechanical anomalies that would have precluded normal operation of the airplane.
According to his pilot logbook, the pilot had not completed a flight review since 2012, and the pilot's last Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) airman medical certificate was issued in 2012. At the time of the accident, he was operating an airplane that required a medical certificate, but his certification was no longer valid.
The pilot's personal medical records showed a history of a chronic progressive neurodegenerative disease beginning in 2011 with intermittent worsening of symptoms. The disease and its symptoms likely impaired his ability to safely operate the airplane. Toxicology testing of samples from the pilot detected ethanol at 0.070 gm/dl in vitreous and 0.038 g/dl in blood. Although blood levels of ethanol can change after death, the vitreous from an intact eye is not subject to significant postmortem changes. Therefore, it is likely the ethanol detected in blood and vitreous was from ingestion. The vitreous blood level was well above the FAA prohibited level of 0.04 gm/dl, and mild impairment has been shown at blood levels as low as 0.020 gm/dl. It is likely that the pilot was experiencing some level of impairment from alcohol ingestion and that the combination of the pilot's progressive degenerative neurologic condition and his use of alcohol impaired his ability to safely operate the airplane and contributed to the accident.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain airplane control, which resulted in a collision with terrain. Contributing to the accident was the pilot's impairment resulting from the combination of his progressive degenerative neurologic condition and his use of alcohol.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN17FA046
- Event ID
- 20161204X04942
- Case number
- CEN17FA046
- 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: f10f137c5f08eb56d29f258b40abd2af8c98567e555e57709b1e91516fb0ce10; retrieved 2026-09-14T22:03:07.361Z.