LAX96LA347 · Piper PA-28-180
Sun Air Aviation Piper PA-28-180 · Accident: airframe, component or system failure en route
From Bermuda Dunes Airport (UDD) to Camarillo International Airport (CMA)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX96LA347
- 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
Piper PA-28-180
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-28
- 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
- N5388L
- Operator
- Sun Air Aviation
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Bermuda Dunes Airport (UDD), Bermuda Dunes, CATo Camarillo International Airport (CMA), Camarillo, 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
- Airframe, component or system 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
- Propeller system/accessories, blade › Failure, total
- Propeller system/accessories, blade › Previous damage
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot reported that during the departure climb about 2,500 feet msl, there was a loud bang, followed by severe airframe vibration. The pilot closed the throttle and pulled the mixture control into idle cutoff. The pilot established a glide and made an uneventful off-airport landing. Postaccident examination revealed that about 20 inches of one propeller blade was missing. The remaining propeller blade and hub was sent the Safety Board's Materials Testing Laboratory for analysis. The analysis report documented a crack progression starting at the blade's trailing edge and migrating forward through about 50 percent of the chord. At that point the blade failed from overload. The report indicated that a mechanical type damage had occurred at the trailing edge crack initiation point. According to the records, at the time of this accident the engine and the propeller had accumulated 307.24 hours since overhaul.
Probable cause
the failure of a propeller blade as a result of undetected in-service mechanical damage that caused a stress point that progressed to a point of failure.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX96LA347
- Event ID
- 20001208X06304
- Case number
- LAX96LA347
- 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 1996-07-13.
- API snapshot SHA-256: a93ea1f322ebcf46e8f6f92c70243e774ef292432dfb30209b4af43077e58350; retrieved 2026-09-22T21:52:42.533Z.