The Cessna 421C took off from Amarillo at 9:10 p.m. on April 30 with pilot Justin Appling and passengers Hayden Dillard, Brooke Skypala, Stacy Hedrick and Seren Wilson aboard. The group was bound for a pickleball tournament near Austin. About an hour into the flight, Appling radioed air traffic controllers to report trouble with the airplane’s anti-icing system.
According to the NTSB’s preliminary findings, released Friday, Appling later reported that an instrument measuring airspeed had “iced up” and that he was relying on backup gauges. He was cleared to descend to 4,000 feet and told controllers he wanted to get to a lower altitude to “warm back up.” During the final 15 minutes of the flight, the plane operated at altitudes where temperatures hovered just below freezing.
Appling’s last radio transmission was logged at 10:59 p.m. The aircraft then entered a series of descending left and right turns before crashing to the ground near Wimberley, about 40 miles southwest of Austin. Investigators recovered pieces of the plane over a 1.25‑mile debris field — a distribution the NTSB called consistent with an in‑flight breakup. Weather conditions at the time were mostly cloudy, and a thunderstorm passed through the area roughly two hours after the crash.
A second plane traveling with the group landed safely at New Braunfels, south of the crash site.
The NTSB’s report is preliminary; a full investigation into the cause of the accident remains under way.