LAX94LA182 · Cessna 152
Cessna 152 · Accident: loss of engine power en route
From John Wayne Orange County International Airport (SNA) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX94LA182
- 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
- N93508
- Operator
- Gary Sequeira
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From John Wayne Orange County International Airport (SNA), Santa Ana, 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 · 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
- Loss of engine power
- 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 › Carburetor heat, not used
- Pilot in command › Weather evaluation, inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
After an over water flight to Catalina Island, the pilot reported having engine trouble and that he was attempting to return to the Catalina airport. The airport is located on a mountain top in an area of the island with steep mountainous terrain. A witness saw the aircraft and heard the engine repeatedly accelerate to full power, interrupted by sputtering and periods of silence. A second witness reported seeing the aircraft in a turn attempting to gain altitude as it approached the higher terrain. Ten minutes later, fire department units responding to reports of a brush fire found the burning aircraft wreckage. The weather at the time included a 20 degree spread between dew point and ambient temperature. Carburetor icing probability charts revealed the aircraft had flown in conditions conducive to moderate icing at cruise power and serious icing at glide power.
Probable cause
the failure of the pilot to apply carburetor heat as appropriate while conducting flight in conditions conducive for carburetor icing. A factor in the accident was the unsuitable steep mountainous terrain for a forced landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX94LA182
- Event ID
- 20001206X01128
- Case number
- LAX94LA182
- 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: local date, investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 1994-04-06.
- API snapshot SHA-256: ccc46749d441b7bdad7a9ae3fd39e8024f388ad71fb73fc665b6ce6cfe5f5177; retrieved 2026-09-21T00:12:11.481Z.