LAX98FA009 · Bellanca 7ECA
Bellanca 7ECA · Accident: in flight collision with object while maneuvering
From Tracy Municipal Airport (TCY) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX98FA009
- 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
Bellanca 7ECA
- Aircraft type
- Bellanca 7
- 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
- N11860
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Tracy Municipal Airport (TCY), 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
- Maneuvering
- 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 object
- Also codedOther events the NTSB coded in the sequence, such as a wire strike after a loss of power. Flight Findings uses them for its kinds of event. Glossary
- Wire, transmission
- 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 › Altitude, low
- Pilot in command › Clearance, not maintained
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot took off from a local airport about 40 minutes prior to the accident. Visual meteorological conditions prevailed at the time of the accident. Family members on the ground witnessed the aircraft flying over wires, which were on the west side of the bean field during previous low passes. The same family members noticed the airplane flying from west to east while attempting to fly under a power line, which paralleled a road. The witnesses indicated that the right wing clipped the power line and the aircraft struck the ground and cartwheeled about 100 yards east of the roadway. The pilot had obtained his private pilot certificate approximately 7 months prior to the accident and had accumulated about 62 hours of documented flight time. A toxicology examination of samples from the pilot yielded positive results for Brompheniramine, Pseudoephedrine, Phenylpropanolamine, and Ephedrine. Brompheniramine commonly results in drowsiness and has a measurable effect on performance of complex cognitive and motor tasks. Pseudoephedrine, Edhedrine, and Phenylpropanolamine all usually result in increased levels of alertness.
Probable cause
The pilot's low operating altitude and his failure to maintain appropriate clearance during low level maneuvering flight. Contributing factors were transmission wires and the physical impairment that resulted from the effects of the over-the-counter medications found during toxicological evaluation.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX98FA009
- Event ID
- 20001208X09046
- Case number
- LAX98FA009
- 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: investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date, which is the same as the UTC date the NTSB stores.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 8c19cc9e9aa7d46138a12af678fc24af9927182d333079fc4e580477ca65e3bd; retrieved 2026-09-20T22:47:36.566Z.