ERA17FA118 · Cessna 421 B
Cessna 421 B · Accident: loss of control in flight on approach
From Tulsa Riverside Airport (RVS) to Cherokee County Regional Airport (CNI)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA17FA118
- 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 421 B
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 421
- 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
- N421KL
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Tulsa Riverside Airport (RVS), Tulsa, OKTo Cherokee County Regional Airport (CNI), Canton, GA
- Aircraft age
- About 47 years (built 1970)
- 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
- Approach · VFR pattern final
- 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 › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The 69-year-old commercial pilot was making a personal cross-country flight in the newly-purchased airplane. When the airplane was on final approach to the destination airport in night visual meteorological conditions, airport surveillance video showed it pitch up and roll to the right. The airplane then descended in a nose-down attitude to impact in a ravine on the right side of the runway. During the descent over the ravine the right wing came in contact with a powerline that briefly cut power to the airport. Postaccident examination of the airframe, engines, and their components revealed no evidence of mechanical anomalies or malfunctions that would have precluded normal operation.
The pilot's toxicology findings identified five different impairing medications: clonazepam, temazepam, hydrocodone, nortriptyline, and diphenhydramine. Although the results were from cavity blood and may not accurately reflect antemortem levels, the hydrocodone, temazepam, and diphenhydramine levels were high enough to likely have had some psychoactive effects. While the exact effects of these drugs in combination are not known, it is likely that the pilot was impaired to some degree by his use of this combination of medications, which likely contributed to his failure to maintain control of the airplane.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain control of the airplane during a night visual landing approach. Contributing to the accident was the pilot's impairment due to his use of a combination of medications.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA17FA118
- Event ID
- 20170304X15812
- Case number
- ERA17FA118
- 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: 0edf6e0087c0b2c320098b8a0d51e4e287331dc7d409d1c60f69115ae83df15e; retrieved 2026-09-15T05:59:21.657Z.