LAX99LA140 · Cessna 210D
Cessna 210D · Accident: total loss of engine power (mechanical failure) en route
From Brackett Field (POC) to Santa Maria Public Airport Captain G Allan Hancock Field (SMX)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX99LA140
- 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 210D
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 210
- 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
- N2340F
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Brackett Field (POC), PAMONA, CATo Santa Maria Public Airport Captain G Allan Hancock Field (SMX), Santa Maria, 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
- Total loss of engine power (mechanical failure)
- 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
- Mixture control, cable › Fatigue
- Mixture control, cable › Separation
- Other maintenance personnel › Maintenance, adjustment, improper
- Other maintenance personnel › Maintenance, installation, improper
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The aircraft had reached its cruise altitude of 8,500 feet when the engine smoothly quit. The pilot contacted a nearby airport control tower, reported the power failure, and said he needed to land. The local controller cleared the flight to land on any runway. Shortly thereafter, the pilot radioed that he would not make the field and landed gear-up in a dry wash area. During the landing, the aircraft collided with trees and an embankment. Examination of the airplane disclosed that the mixture control cable was fractured and disconnected from the cable's rod-eye end, which was still attached to the mixture arm of the fuel metering unit. The break in the cable was at the engine rod-eye end of the flexible cable at the point where the cable is swaged onto the rod. A metal outer sheath slides over the rod and the eye end of the rod is longitudinally adjustable so that the rod and cable can ride inside the outer metal sheath to provide support against bending loads. The length adjustment nuts on the rod-eye end were found adjusted all the way down so that the cable to rod swage point was outside the sheath at the full rich mixture setting. Metallurgical examination of the cable found that it failed in fatigue due to excessive and repetitive bending. According to the maintenance records, the mixture control cable was replaced at the last annual inspection on June 2, 1998, 99 hours prior to the accident. No other anomalies were found with the engine or its related systems.
Probable cause
A loss of engine power due to the fatigue failure of the mixture control cable, which was due to the improper installation and adjustment of the cable 99 hours prior to the accident.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX99LA140
- Event ID
- 20001205X00492
- Case number
- LAX99LA140
- 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: 6add9c598baccd07d9cc222b5b63c0e6ac9ffe584e0da97fde87d2e94b69d619; retrieved 2026-09-21T20:34:30.820Z.