LAX99FA102 · North American T-28B
North American T-28B · Accident: in flight encounter with weather en route
From Van Nuys Airport (VNY) to Jacqueline Cochran Regional Airport (TRM)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX99FA102
- 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
- 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
- Unknown
North American T-28B
- Aircraft type
- North American T-28
- 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
- N628B
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Van Nuys Airport (VNY), Van Nuys, CATo Jacqueline Cochran Regional Airport (TRM), Thermal, CA
- Aircraft age
- Not recorded
- 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 · cruise
- First occurrenceThe 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
- In flight encounter with weather
- Also codedOther events the NTSB coded in the sequence, such as a wire strike after a loss of power. Flight Findings uses them for its kinds of event. Glossary
- Visual flight rules (VFR) flight into instrument meteorological conditions (IMC)
- 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
- Pilot in command › Flight into adverse weather, intentional
- Pilot in command › VFR flight into imc, inadvertent
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The aircraft was flying in the wing position in a two-aircraft formation. The pilot of the lead aircraft received a preflight weather briefing that included an AIRMET for mountain obscuration throughout the intended area of flight. The area forecast was for broken ceilings at 1,500 to 2,500 feet and a second broken layer at 3,000 to 5,000 feet. When the flight did not arrive at its destination, a search was initiated and the two airplanes were found on a mountain slope at 5,300 feet mean sea level (MSL). The lead aircraft impacted the slope about 250 feet below a ridgeline. The wingman impacted approximately 220 feet further up the same slope and offset 30 feet to the right. Park service rangers reported that weather near the accident site at the time consisted of overcast clouds with the tops of the mountains intermittently obscured in clouds, snow, and light rain. Scattered clouds locally obscured lower terrain. The nearest weather reporting point, 17 miles distant, reported an overcast cloud layer at 5,300 feet MSL.
Probable cause
The pilot's decision to attempt flight into an area of known adverse weather and the subsequent inadvertent VFR flight into IFR conditions resulting in an in-flight collision with mountainous terrain.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX99FA102
- Event ID
- 20001205X00245
- Case number
- LAX99FA102
- Dataset
- historical-pre2008
- Source SHA-256
- 89e2df6d848e7ab3b42e7d7c7a03ff403303057a26ca04c95b3ea67201c3ce74
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: 9c52ed4915cb59f9cd65dbdba4c6ee28a92625b7a0a14747a50ede5636118693; retrieved 2026-09-20T22:15:24.503Z.