LAX96FA115 · Cessna 172N
Cessna 172N · Accident: in flight collision with terrain/water en route
From Imperial County Airport (IPL) to McClellan-Palomar Airport (CRQ)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX96FA115
- 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
- 3 · 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
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
Cessna 172N
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 172
- 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
- N738ED
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Imperial County Airport (IPL), El Centro, CATo McClellan-Palomar Airport (CRQ), Carlsbad, 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
- 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 › Remedial action, delayed
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight was operating in visual conditions on an instrument flight plan at night. The pilot informed ATC that he was having difficulty maintaining his assigned altitude in downdrafts as his course converged on the lee side of the mountain ridge line. As he approached the VORTAC, located on a peak on the ridge line, the downdraft intensity increased and he was unable to maintain the en route MEA and the aircraft descended into an undercast cloud layer. The pilot requested vectors out of the downdraft but the aircraft impacted the face of the ridge 300 feet below the crest. A pilot following in another aircraft reported that conditions were clear and visibility unrestricted over lower terrain away from the ridge.
Probable cause
the pilot's delay in requesting assistance to avoid high terrain. Factors were: the downdrafts, mountainous terrain, and the pilot's improper in-flight planning.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX96FA115
- Event ID
- 20001208X05274
- Case number
- LAX96FA115
- 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 1996-02-20.
- API snapshot SHA-256: b1321448c8e0ac4465a5670390a633b2a2bfa21673cd73cc8f579b527bf4cf56; retrieved 2026-09-20T23:25:26.318Z.