A Cessna 172 similar to N734ZK in the approach-to-landing configuration.
Aviation Law Group is deeply saddened by Monday’s crash at Montgomery Field (MYF). One of our attorneys spent several years at MYF as a flight instructor, and the people who fly out of that airport are a small community that looks after its own. Two of them went flying on a holiday afternoon and did not come home. Our thoughts are with their families, and with the students, instructors, and line workers who watched it happen and could not reach them.
On Monday, September 7, 2026, at about 5:19 pm, a Cessna 172 practicing landings at Montgomery-Gibbs Executive Airport (MYF) in Kearny Mesa came down short of Runway 28L, struck the ground, and caught fire. Both people aboard passed away. The NTSB is leading the investigation. The identities of the two aboard, and which of them was flying, have not been released, and nothing in this post should be read as a statement about either of them.
Attorney Brendan Keegan instructed at Montgomery Field for several years and has over one thousand hours flying in and out of it. He has flown the pattern this airplane was flying more times than he can count, and he has taught the maneuver that was likely underway in its final seconds. What follows is his account of what the public record already shows, explained for readers who have never sat in a small airplane, along with the questions the investigators will now be working to answer.
The Airplane
The aircraft was N734ZK, a 1977 Cessna 172N Skyhawk, serial number 17269243, powered by a 160 horsepower Lycoming O-320 engine. The 172 is the most-produced airplane in history and the standard trainer at flight schools across the country. Age alone tells you little about a 172; a 49-year-old airframe that has been maintained to the book is a safe airplane. The record of that maintenance is what matters.
According to the FAA registry, the airplane has been registered since January 2020 to an individual owner in northern Idaho, not to a flight school. It was reportedly being operated by a local San Diego flight school. That arrangement is common and is called a leaseback: a private owner buys the airplane, the school rents it to students and maintains it, and the owner receives the rental income. It also means that when something goes wrong, at least two parties are involved before anyone reaches the question of who did the maintenance, when the last inspections were completed, and what was written up in the airplane’s discrepancy log. Those records will be in the NTSB’s file.
The Airport
Montgomery-Gibbs Executive Airport, known to pilots as MYF or simply Montgomery, is one of the busiest general aviation airports in California. It has three runways. Two of them run side by side, east to west, and this is where the airport’s character comes from.
The runway layout of Montgomery-Gibbs Executive Airport (MYF).
The larger one, Runway 28R, is 4,598 feet long and 150 feet wide. The smaller one, Runway 28L, is 3,401 feet long and 60 feet wide. Think of a five-lane freeway next to a two-lane road. Airplanes landing to the west use the “28” end of each; the L and R mean left and right as the pilot sees them on approach.
“Runway 28L is where San Diego learns to land.”
Because the two runways are so close together, airplanes using them fly what pilots call a traffic pattern in opposite directions. A traffic pattern is a rectangular circuit around the runway: take off, turn, fly parallel to the runway in the opposite direction, turn again, and line up to land. Airplanes on 28L fly a left pattern, meaning every turn is to the left, so they circle south of the airport. Airplanes on 28R fly a right pattern, circling north. The two circuits are mirror images, and the reason is simple: airplanes on the parallel runways turn away from each other rather than into each other.
In practice, 28R is used by transient airplanes, faster airplanes, and pilots arriving on instrument approaches. Runway 28L is where San Diego learns to land. On any afternoon there may be several trainers in the 28L pattern, each flying a lap every five or six minutes, talking to the tower, sequenced among jets and helicopters using the other runway, all under the busy arrival corridor of San Diego Lindbergh’s airspace. It is a demanding environment for a student, and instructors at Montgomery spend much of their time managing that workload so the student can concentrate on flying.
Runway 28L points almost due west. At 5:19 pm in early September the sun is low and slightly to the left of the nose on final approach.
The Weather
The weather was good. The airport’s automated station reported clear skies, 10 miles of visibility, and no gusts. Verbatim, the observation 26 minutes before the accident:
METAR KMYF 072353Z 32017KT 10SM CLR 32/18 A2983 RMK AO2 SLP094 T03170183
In plain language: wind from the northwest at roughly 20 mph; clear; temperature about 90°F. The observation after the accident was nearly identical, with the wind at 19 mph.
Runway 28L points at 295 degrees relative to due north. A wind from 320 to 330 degrees is 25 to 35 degrees off the airplane’s nose, from the right. That works out to a headwind of about 15 to 18 mph and a crosswind from the right of about 9 to 12 mph. None of that is extreme. It is an ordinary strong San Diego sea breeze, well within what a 172 and a student pilot handle every afternoon.
The temperature matters more than the wind. Hot air is thin air, and thin air reduces what a wing and an engine can do. Pilots measure this as what’s called density altitude: the altitude at which the airplane “thinks” it is flying. Montgomery sits 427 feet above sea level, but at 90°F the density altitude was roughly 2,600 to 2,700 feet. A 160 horsepower Cessna on a cool morning climbs noticeably more faster than on an afternoon like this one.
What the Flight Track Shows
Like most aircraft today, N734ZK broadcast its position, altitude, and speed every few seconds. That data, called ADS-B, is publicly archived, and we have compared it against the FAA’s surveyed coordinates for the Montgomery runways. Positions are accurate to roughly 100 feet, and the record has gaps near the ground, so every figure below should be read as approximate. It is also important to understand what this data does not contain. A Cessna 172 has no flight data recorder. ADS-B shows where the airplane was and how fast it was moving over the ground. It does not show airspeed, engine power, control inputs, or who was flying.
The airplane taxied out at 4:13 pm and took off from 28L at about 4:27 pm. Over the next 52 minutes it flew nine approaches to Runway 28L, landing at 4:33, 4:40, 4:44, 4:50, 4:56, 5:03, 5:08, and 5:13, and beginning its final approach at 5:19. Every one was to 28L. Eight of the landings were “touch and goes“: the airplane touched down, rolled a few hundred feet, and took off again without stopping. This is how landings are practiced. A pilot maintaining currency does three. Ten in an hour is a lesson.
The Air Traffic Control tower’s final instruction to the aircraft, from the recording, was “cleared for the option, Runway 28L.” That phrase is used almost exclusively for training. It means the tower has approved any of the following, at the pilot’s discretion:
- a full-stop landing
- a touch and go*
- a stop and go
- a low pass
- a go-around
Nothing in that clearance limited what the crew could do. Every choice, including abandoning the approach, was pre-approved. On the earlier laps the airplane crossed the last half mile to the runway at 45 to 55 knots over the ground, which with a 15 knot headwind is about 60 to 70 knots of airspeed, a normal approach speed for a 172. The final approach began the same way and then did not.
*We note that there are some school’s that refuse to let students practice touch and goes because of the inherent difficulty in learning the maneuver. These school’s impose a restriction that requires student pilots to do stop and goes, or “full stop taxi-backs” (come to a stop, exit the runway, and taxi back to the runway to do the traffic pattern again). However, there is no standard among the flight training sector that requires this.
Why the Flight Track Tells a Story
| Time | Distance short of the runway | Distance right of centerline | Speed over the ground |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5:18:59 pm | about 1,500 ft | about 30 ft | 43 kt |
| 5:19:03 | 1,200 ft | 43 ft | 40 kt |
| 5:19:08 | 910 ft | 59 ft | 38 kt |
| 5:19:11 | 660 ft | 98 ft | 31 kt |
| 5:19:15 | 430 ft | 95 ft | 35 kt |
| 5:19:19 | 210 ft | 157 ft | 25 kt |
| 5:19:21 | 136 ft | 200 ft | 9 kt |
Final approach of N734ZK to Runway 28L from ADS-B data, positions relative to the FAA-surveyed threshold and centerline. Approximate.
Two things stand out. First, the airplane never reached the runway. The last airborne positions are about 200 feet short of the threshold, the beginning of the pavement, and 150 to 200 feet to the right of it. That is the run-up area northeast of the 28L threshold, a paved apron where pilots test their engines before takeoff, and it is exactly where the photographs show the wreckage. On a normal weekday afternoon that apron would have airplanes on it. On Labor Day it appears to have been empty.
Second, the airplane slowed while still well short of the runway. Adding the headwind back, 38 knots over the ground at 5:19:08 is about 53 knots of airspeed, normal for the last few hundred feet of an approach. By 5:19:19 the airplane was moving 25 knots over the ground, about 40 knots of airspeed. The Cessna 172N’s published stall speed, depending on flap setting and weight, is roughly 44 to 50 knots. We set those two figures side by side and leave the comparison to the reader and to the NTSB.
There is a third detail. The wind was from the right. An airplane that is simply being pushed off course by a right crosswind drifts left, downwind. This airplane moved steadily to the right, into the wind, for the last twenty seconds. A movement into the wind is not the wind. It is the airplane turning or banking to the right. One witness described the airplane appearing to tilt to the right as it came in, with a wing striking the ground. Investigators will compare that account, and the track, against the position of the wreckage and the flight controls.
What a Stall Is, and Why It Is Dangerous Close to the Ground
The word stall confuses people, because in a car it means the engine quit. In an airplane it has nothing to do with the engine. A wing produces lift by meeting the oncoming air at a slight upward angle, which pilots call angle of attack. Increase that angle too far and the smooth flow of air over the wing breaks down. The wing stops lifting, all at once, no matter how much power the engine is producing.
Speed is how pilots keep track of this. The slower an airplane flies, the higher the nose must be held to stay in the air, and the steeper the angle becomes, until the wing’s lift “stalls“. Every airplane has a published stall speed for that reason. When a stall happens with the airplane banked or yawed even slightly, one wing stalls before the other and drops, the airplane rolls toward it, and the nose falls.
“Altitude is Insurance“
Recovering takes altitude. From 3,000 feet it is a routine training exercise that every student practices. From 100 feet there is no altitude to spend. In other words, altitude is insurance. And we pilots lose that insurance the closer we get to the ground.
The FAA’s training handbook calls the version that happens on the way to a landing an “approach-to-landing stall“: flaps down, power low, nose rising as the airplane slows, often with the pilot’s attention on the runway rather than the airspeed indicator. A strong headwind makes this trap worse, because the ground goes by slowly and the approach looks and feels right even as the airspeed decays. A narrow runway adds to it, because on a 60 foot wide strip a small drift becomes obvious and demands attention at exactly the moment the speed is slipping away.
Students are taught to recognize the warning signs: the stall horn, sluggish controls, a mushy feel, the airplane beginning to sink. They are taught this deliberately, at altitude, precisely because in the pattern there is no room to learn it.
A Pilot’s Escape Valve: The Go Around
The recovery from an approach that is not working is a go-around: add full power, stop the descent, climb away, and come back to try again. It is taught from the first lessons, and every instructor’s rule is the same: go around early, not late. There was no go-around call on the tower recording, which tells us nothing either way; pilots are not required to announce one before executing it.
What readers may not appreciate is how much happens in a go-around, and how quickly. In a 172 at 50 feet, applying full power makes the nose pitch up hard and the airplane swing to the left, both because of the propeller. The pilot must push forward to hold the nose down, add right rudder to hold the airplane straight, retract the flaps in stages because raising them all at once at low speed causes the airplane to sink, hold a climb attitude without over-rotating into that dangerous stall we talked about above, accelerate, make a radio call (time allowing), and look out for traffic in the parallel pattern. Done cleanly, it takes five seconds. Done late, from an airplane that is already too slow, it is no longer a go-around. It is a stall recovery with no altitude, and full power at a high angle of attack, with the airplane swinging left, is the classic setup for one wing to drop.
That high temperature, or density altitude, ties in here. On a 90°F afternoon, a 172N has less surplus power to climb with, and accelerating from 45 to 60 knots takes longer than it would in January. A marginal go-around at sea level on a cool day is a different maneuver on a hot September evening.
If an instructor was aboard, and a session of ten practice landings strongly suggests instruction, then the instructor faced the dilemma every instructor at Montgomery knows: a student learns only by being allowed to get it wrong, and the instructor must take the controls before wrong becomes unrecoverable. On short final that window is a second or two. We do not say this to assign anything to anyone. We say it because it is the job, and because the people who do it deserve to have it understood.
What Investigators Will Look At
Because the 172 carries no recorder, the investigation will rest on the wreckage, the engine, the records, and the witnesses. The engine will be torn down to determine whether it was producing power at impact; the propeller blades record that in their bends and scratches. The flap setting, the position of the flight controls, and the orientation of the wreckage on the run-up pad will be documented. The airplane’s maintenance records under the leaseback, the school’s dispatch and training records, the tower recording, any airport camera footage, and the airplane’s earlier flight that same day will all be gathered.
The NTSB typically publishes a preliminary report within two to three weeks. It will contain facts only and no analysis. The final report, with a probable cause, usually takes twelve to twenty-four months. The families of the two people who died will learn what happened from that process, and they should be cautious of anyone who claims to know the answer before then, including us.
Our Experience
The Aviation Law Group, PLLC (ALG) is a firm devoted exclusively to aviation accident litigation.
Our attorneys are all licensed pilots and some are also former aircraft mechanics. Collectively, our lawyers hold thousands of hours of flight and instructional time and two of our attorneys have flown or continue to fly in international airline operations. We know the culture, the equipment, and the realities of flying in and out of Montgomery-Gibbs Executive Airport (MYF) and the operational pressures that come with the busy San Diego airspace.
ALG maintains offices in Washington State, South Florida, and Hawaii with attorneys licensed in California, Florida, Washington, Hawaii, Alaska, Texas, New Mexico, and Vermont, and through association with local counsel, represent clients in all 50 states and internationally. If your family was affected by this horrific accident this labor day and you would like to understand what happened and what your options are, we would be honored to talk with you in a confidential, no-obligation consultation.
Contact info@aviationlawgroup.com or call 206-464-1166