LAX96LA001 · Mooney M20E
Mooney M20E · Accident: loss of engine power en route
From Catalina Airport (AVX) to Brackett Field (POC)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX96LA001
- 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
Mooney M20E
- Aircraft type
- Mooney M20
- 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
- N79820
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Catalina Airport (AVX), Avalon, CATo Brackett Field (POC), La Verne, 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
- 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
- Reason for occurrence undetermined
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
While flying over the ocean, the pilot reported to the radar sector controller that the engine lost power. Then the pilot said that the engine restarted, but didn't sound good. Moments later he reported that the engine lost power and that he was going to ditch the airplane in the ocean. The sector controller immediately initiated search and rescue procedures. The two passengers were rescued. Neither the airplane nor the pilot was recovered. A fixed-base operator reported that on the evening before the accident, the airplane's right fuel tank was almost full; the left fuel tank was between 1/4 and 1/2 full. The pilot had purchased the airplane about 2 weeks before the accident; it could not be determined if the pilot received any instruction or a check-out in the airplane.
Probable cause
a loss of engine power for undeternined reasons.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX96LA001
- Event ID
- 20001207X04716
- Case number
- LAX96LA001
- 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 1995-10-02.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 5d9f4b72c07dba7bdcef8b9cec1e3fe95ff5edc6a598541eaea57fe56fa99b20; retrieved 2026-09-20T23:34:50.434Z.