CEN18FA359 · Piper PA28R 180
Space City Aviators Piper PA28R 180 · Accident: controlled flight into terrain/object (CFIT) en route
From Abbeville Chris Crusta Memorial Airport (IYA) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN18FA359
- 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
- 2 · 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 PA28R 180
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA28
- 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
- N7430J
- Operator
- Space City Aviators
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Abbeville Chris Crusta Memorial Airport (IYA), Abbeville, LATo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 50 years (built 1968)
- 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
- Controlled flight into terrain/object (CFIT)
- Also codedOther events the NTSB coded in the sequence, such as a wire strike after a loss of power. Flight Findings uses them for its kinds of event. Glossary
- Tower/antenna (incl guy wires)
- 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
- Environmental issues › Physical environment
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, not marked as estimated; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airline transport pilot and his daughter departed in day visual meteorological conditions with the morning sun located behind the airplane. About 10 minutes after takeoff, the airplane impacted a charted, 1,793-ft-tall television/radio tower about 200 ft below the apex of the tower. Examination of the airframe and engine revealed no evidence of mechanical malfunctions or failures that would have precluded normal operation. The pilot and his wife were in the process of divorce. The pilot's wife was very concerned after the pilot and her daughter departed without notice several weeks before the accident. The pilot had become unresponsive to phone calls from his work supervisor and had been making unauthorized purchases with his work credit card before the accident. On the day before the accident, the pilot's attorney informed the pilot that a warrant had been issued for his arrest.
A direct course from the departure airport to the pilot's home airport was over 5 miles south of the tower. Although a surveillance video and witness statements indicated that the tower's lighting was erratic, the tower was adequately lit, and the visibility of the tower was not a factor in the accident.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain clearance from a charted and illuminated television/radio tower.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN18FA359
- Event ID
- 20180831X10324
- Case number
- CEN18FA359
- 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, coordinates. 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: c5026766d4ee8f0575aa22559265fe40d54d1198a4cc283c652dd67d6dee5252; retrieved 2026-09-15T06:47:15.658Z.