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CEN22LA164 · Mooney M20E

31 Mar 2022 · Kerrville, TX, United States

Mooney M20E · Accident: medical event while taxiing

From Kerrville / Kerr County Airport at Louis Schreiner Field (ERV) to an unrecorded destination

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Event

NTSB case
CEN22LA164
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

Mooney M20E

Aircraft type
Mooney M20
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
N21BS
Operator
Unknown
Onboard fatalities
Unknown
Route
From Kerrville / Kerr County Airport at Louis Schreiner Field (ERV), Kerrville, TXTo not recorded
Aircraft age
About 47 years (built 1975)
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
Taxi · from runway
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

Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.

NTSB narrative

After a local flight, the airplane landed, and a witness saw the airplane taxi over a grass-covered area and then onto the ramp at a higher-than-normal speed. The airplane struck a parked airplane, and the left wing became wedged underneath the empennage of the parked airplane. Airport personnel responded and discovered that the pilot was slumped over the flight controls and unresponsive. Emergency responders attempted CPR, but the pilot did not recover and was transported to a hospital where he was declared deceased. The airplane’s left wing sustained substantial damage. Examination of the airplane’s flight control, brake systems, and related systems did not reveal any mechanical anomalies that would have precluded normal operations. The pilot’s cause of death was atherosclerotic and hypertensive cardiovascular disease in association with obesity; the manner of death was reported as natural. There was significant cardiovascular disease identified by the autopsy without evidence of significant trauma. His cardiovascular conditions placed him at increased risk for a sudden cardiac event. Given the medical findings and the circumstances of this accident, it is likely that the pilot’s incapacitation from a sudden cardiac event caused the accident.

Probable cause

The pilot’s sudden cardiac event, which resulted in incapacitation, uncontrolled taxi after landing, and collision with a stationary parked airplane.

Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset

Sources

NTSB record CEN22LA164
Event ID
20220331104866
Case number
CEN22LA164
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, cause areas. 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: 3da7e2e540a178bc5195aa6578bf272c519f89a629be7c66bc1046ad28471d8e; retrieved 2026-09-15T07:42:39.389Z.