CEN19FA221 · Cessna 172 S
West Houston Airport Cessna 172 S · Accident en route
From West Houston Airport (IWS) to West Houston Airport (IWS)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN19FA221
- 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 172 S
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 172
- 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
- N517LA
- Operator
- West Houston Airport
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From West Houston Airport (IWS), Houston, TXTo West Houston Airport (IWS), Houston, TX
- Aircraft age
- About 10 years (built 2009)
- 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
- Unknown or undetermined
- 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
- Not determined › Not determined
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot departed on a local personal flight in day visual meteorological conditions. According to flight track data, after departure from the airport to the north, the airplane made a left turn to the southwest. The airplane continued to travel southwest over a major highway and then continued to the west. Over the final 1.5 minutes of the approximate 3-minute flight, the airplane's speed increased from about 104 kts to about 151 kts and the altitude descended from 1,050 ft to about 300 ft at the last data point. The airplane impacted a tree, parking lot, and building and the airplane was destroyed from fragmentation upon impact with terrain and the postimpact fire. A witness near the accident site thought that the airplane was going to land in an open field nearby. He stated that the airplane was "very low" and it "banked to the right" before impact. The witness reported that the engine sounded "totally revved with a high pitch" and the engine did not produce any abnormal sounds. Postaccident examination revealed no preimpact mechanical malfunctions or failures that would have precluded normal operation. Autopsy and toxicological testing of the pilot revealed no evidence of physiological impairment or incapacitation. The circumstances of the accident are consistent with an inflight loss of control; however, the reason for the loss of control could not be determined based on the available information.
Probable cause
The pilot’s loss of airplane control and subsequent impact with terrain for reasons that could not be determined based on the available information.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN19FA221
- Event ID
- 20190713X34059
- Case number
- CEN19FA221
- 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: 2bc934570c7a1ca4d600b83ad101f949ad0fb1fe17e50e6d27625233ad205ca3; retrieved 2026-09-15T07:01:51.761Z.