WPR17FA052 · Piper PA 28-236
Piper PA 28-236 · Accident: loss of control in flight en route
From Southwest Oregon Regional Airport (OTH) to Southwest Oregon Regional Airport (OTH)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR17FA052
- 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 PA 28-236
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-28
- 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
- N81839
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Southwest Oregon Regional Airport (OTH), North Bend, ORTo Southwest Oregon Regional Airport (OTH), North Bend, OR
- Aircraft age
- About 37 years (built 1980)
- 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
- 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
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Aircraft › Aircraft oper/perf/capability
- Personnel issues › Physical
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The 79-year-old private pilot was making a local personal flight in his airplane when he reported over the aircraft emergency frequency that he was losing vision in one of his eyes. About the same time, a radar target using the emergency transponder squawk code was acquired traveling northbound along the coastline. The airplane wreckage was subsequently located on a beach close to the last radar target. The damage to the airplane was consistent with a high-speed, left wing-low impact due to a loss of control.
According to the pilot's son, the pilot had been diagnosed with multiple chemical sensitivity and had a history of sudden vision loss, sometimes in just one eye but at other times in both eyes, which had been attributed to his chemical sensitivity. He had not reported the episodes of vision loss or the chemical sensitivity on any of his Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) medical applications. His most recent FAA medical certificate had expired 5 years before the accident, and it had been 5 years since he had accomplished a flight review. The pilot continued to fly, and his flight instructor, who had given the pilot his last flight review and flew with him 1 year before the accident, reported a significant degradation in the pilot's flying skills.
Probable cause
The pilot's loss of vision during cruise flight, which resulted in a loss of aircraft control. Contributing to the accident was the pilot's decision to fly with a known medical condition.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR17FA052
- Event ID
- 20170113X04821
- Case number
- WPR17FA052
- 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: 8cd4e2b9244c3bb8cf3d81d4cdcc584c166821b0e92dc2945efe27022dae6bc2; retrieved 2026-09-14T22:06:49.845Z.