LAX96LA058 · Cessna 152
Cessna 152 · Accident: loss of engine power en route
From Hayward Executive Airport (HWD) to Reid-Hillview Airport of Santa Clara County (RHV)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX96LA058
- 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 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
- N6349M
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Hayward Executive Airport (HWD)To Reid-Hillview Airport of Santa Clara County (RHV), San Jose, 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 · climb to 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
After a private pilot and a flight instructor (CFI) took off in a Cessna 152, they reported a rough running engine. They attempted to return to the airport, but did not have sufficient altitude and crash-landed on an abandoned golf course. After landing, the private pilot told police that he was the pilot-in-command (PIC) and that he had not run out of fuel. A check of the fuel tanks showed about 2 inches in the left tank and none in the right tank. The private pilot told the operator that the CFI took over and made the forced landing, which the CFI confirmed. Recovery personnel drained between 7 and 8 gallons of fuel from the airplane before removing it from the golf course. A postaccident run of the engine met all the manufacturer's established parameters. The aircraft and engine logbooks were reviewed, and no discrepancies were found. The temperature and dew point were 62 and 45 degrees F, respectively. According to icing probability charts, conditions were conducive for carburetor ice; however, carburetor ice was not verified.
Probable cause
loss of engine power for an undetermined reason.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX96LA058
- Event ID
- 20001207X04884
- Case number
- LAX96LA058
- 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 1995-11-28.
- API snapshot SHA-256: ef39e7fdd0b42afa188581628e1be2e29e086a899ae6841d495f5161c3a15830; retrieved 2026-09-22T23:00:15.297Z.