WPR24LA003 · Cessna 340A
Cessna 340A · Accident: medical event while taxiing
From an unrecorded airport to Monterey Regional Airport (KMRY)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR24LA003
- 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
- 0 · all aircraft and ground
- Ground fatalities
- 0
- 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 340A
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 340
- 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
- N121CB
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo Monterey Regional Airport (KMRY), Monterey, CA
- Aircraft age
- About 47 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
- Taxi
- 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
- Environmental issues › Physical environment
- Personnel issues › Physical
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot had just removed the airplane from his hangar and started both engines. While setting up the avionics, the pilot was suddenly incapacitated, and the airplane began to move across a taxiway. The passenger attempted to wake the pilot, but the airplane continued across a taxiway intersection and into the runway safety area before it collided with a swale. The nose landing gear collapsed and both wings sustained substantial damage. Postaccident medical examination of the pilot attributed the loss of consciousness to an episode of abnormal heartbeat due to a previously undiagnosed underlying heart disease. Thus, the pilot’s sudden incapacitation from effects of previously undiagnosed heart disease likely caused the accident. The pilot reported that there were no preaccident mechanical malfunctions or failures with the airplane that would have precluded normal operation.
Probable cause
The pilot’s sudden incapacitation from effects of a previously undiagnosed underlying heart disease, which resulted in his loss of control of the airplane and subsequent impact with terrain.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR24LA003
- Event ID
- 20231003193184
- Case number
- WPR24LA003
- 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, 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: d19fb65bef83c6c48f7a5d136fe4789f6102e1550a2088b7af07636db9146010; retrieved 2026-09-16T18:11:26.113Z.