ERA19FA181 · Piper PA28R 180
Piper PA28R 180 · Accident: loss of control in flight en route
From Cincinnati Municipal Airport Lunken Field (LUK) to 7GB · Middlefield, OH
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA19FA181
- 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 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
- N3933T
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Cincinnati Municipal Airport Lunken Field (LUK), Lunken, OHTo 7GB · Middlefield, OH
- Aircraft age
- About 52 years (built 1967)
- 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
- Personnel issues › Psychological
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot departed on a visual flight rules cross-country flight in dark night conditions. Radar data indicated that, about 9 miles from the destination airport, the airplane turned left from its previously established heading and shortly thereafter, it entered a steep, descending right turn that continued until radar contact was lost. The airplane impacted heavily-wooded terrain about 8 miles from the airport. Examination of the wreckage revealed no preimpact mechanical deficiencies that would have precluded normal operation of the airplane or engine.
AIRMETs for instrument flight rules conditions and turbulence were valid at the time of the accident for the area of the accident site. Although the weather observation nearest the accident site around the time of the accident indicated visual flight rules conditions with an overcast cloud ceiling about 5,000 ft above ground level, a witness near the accident site reported an "extremely low cloud deck" at the time of the accident. Further, the weather observations at an airport south of the pilot's destination airport indicated weather conditions were deteriorating. While the pilot did text his girlfriend an image of convective weather activity, there was no record that the pilot obtained a weather briefing for the flight or requested any weather information from flight service or commercial sources. The pilot had received his private pilot certificate about 2 months before the accident and did not have an instrument rating.
Autopsy of the pilot revealed evidence of severe atherosclerotic coronary artery disease and an old myocardial infarction; however, the circumstances of the accident are more consistent with a loss of control due to spatial disorientation than with pilot incapacitation. The pilot's lack of an instrument rating and the dark night conditions both would have been conducive to the development of spatial disorientation, and the airplane's descending turn and high-energy impact are both consistent with the known effects of spatial disorientation.
Probable cause
The pilot's loss of control due to spatial disorientation in dark night conditions. Contributing to the accident was his inadequate weather planning, lack of experience flying at night and the deteriorating weather conditions.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA19FA181
- Event ID
- 20190529X03317
- Case number
- ERA19FA181
- 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: 0a02816dc3c510d017c0feaf806bed0e221bf70cb8897b8ec90b92e1f842bbf6; retrieved 2026-09-15T06:59:02.806Z.