LAX99FA129 · Cessna 152
Cessna 152 · Accident: in flight collision with terrain/water en route
From Upland-Cable Airport (CCB) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX99FA129
- 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
- Visual Meteorological Cond
Cessna 152
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 152
- 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
- N67821
- Operator
- Cableair
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Upland-Cable Airport (CCB), Upland, CATo not recorded
- 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 · descent
- 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 collision with terrain/water
- 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 › Altitude/clearance, not maintained
Not plotted · Location withheld: coordinates are missing, conflicting, invalid, or have no accepted acquisition method. No substitute location has been invented.
NTSB narrative
The 21-year-old private pilot was rated for airplane single engine land, sea, and instrument. He was an engineering student in his senior year, and his goal was to become an aerospace engineer. The pilot had an eye condition with 2 prior extraocular muscle surgeries. He rented an airplane for a local area flight. Witnesses reported seeing the airplane descending about 45 degrees at high engine power into mountainous terrain. A sheriff's helicopter pilot reported, about 15 minutes after the accident that the weather at the accident site was clear with 10 miles visibility and the wind was from the southwest (up canyon). The airplane collided with a 60-degree canyon wall near a location called 'Party Rock Point.' The tachometer needle was imprinted onto the instrument face at 2,650 rpm; the redline is 2,550 rpm. The wing structure was accordioned from leading edge to trailing edge, as was the fuselage. No mechanical discrepancies were found with the airplane.
Probable cause
the pilot's failure to maintain altitude/clearance from mountainous terrain for unknown reasons.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX99FA129
- Event ID
- 20001205X00337
- Case number
- LAX99FA129
- 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: f8370b5f66580d167abeccefd38a32e5a1d322a7ff7858189c6c37f26b4a4820; retrieved 2026-09-20T22:11:55.084Z.