CEN19LA053 · Piper PA28 181
Piper PA28 181 · Accident: medical event while maneuvering
From Mitchell Municipal Airport (MHE) to Marv Skie / Lincoln County Airport (Y14)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN19LA053
- 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 PA28 181
- 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
- N75191
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Mitchell Municipal Airport (MHE), Mitchell, SDTo Marv Skie / Lincoln County Airport (Y14), Tea, SD
- Aircraft age
- About 43 years (built 1976)
- 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
- Medical event
- 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
- Personnel issues › Physical
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
About 15 minutes after departing on a cross-country flight in day visual meteorological conditions, the pilot contacted air traffic control to report that he was having chest pain and blacking out, and was having difficulty controlling the airplane. The controller continued to communicate with the pilot for about 20 minutes before radio contact was lost. The wreckage was subsequently located in a field. Examination did not reveal any preimpact anomalies that would have precluded normal operation of the airplane.
The pilot's Federal Aviation Administration medical certificate expired about 10 weeks before the accident. He had begun but not completed the requirements for operation under BasicMed. Autopsy of the pilot identified coronary artery disease including 80% stenosis of the left anterior descending coronary artery and 50% stenosis of the right coronary artery and diagnosed an acute myocardial infarction (heart attack). It is likely that the sudden, impairing effects of the heart attack and associated severe chest pain resulted in the pilot's loss of airplane control while attempting to land in a field, and its subsequent impact with terrain.
Probable cause
The incapacitating effects of an acute myocardial infarction (heart attack), which resulted in the pilot's loss of airplane control and impact with terrain.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN19LA053
- Event ID
- 20190114X05720
- Case number
- CEN19LA053
- 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: ae472768c1e1a21c15d81a8544cffb2ef164224044e29f77c962b11a0fb69337; retrieved 2026-09-15T06:53:01.630Z.