LAX98LA067 · Cessna 210
Cessna 210 · Accident: total loss of engine power (mechanical failure) on approach
From Long Beach International Airport (LGB) to Compton Woodley Airport (CPM)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX98LA067
- 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 210
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 210
- 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
- N9406X
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Long Beach International Airport (LGB), Long Beach, CATo Compton Woodley Airport (CPM)
- 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
- Approach
- 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
- Total loss of engine power (mechanical failure)
- 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
- Fuel starvation; Utility pole; 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
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Fluid, fuel › Starvation
- Fuel system, line › Chafed
- Fuel system, line › Leak
- Other maintenance personnel › Maintenance, annual inspection, inadequate
- Other maintenance personnel › Maintenance, inspection, inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
Following loss of engine power, an emergency off-airport landing was made on a city street. Examination of the aircraft revealed an abraded solid aluminum fuel line between the fuel selector valve and the engine. When the fuel selector valve was turned on, a knife-shaped stream of fuel emanated from the line. When viewed with an inspection mirror, the abraded area appeared V-shaped (grooved) and there was a hole approximately 1/16-inch diameter though the wall of the tube at the deepest part of the groove. Dried, crusty fuel stains were present on the fuel line over a distance of approximately 2 inches. Adjacent to the area of the leak there was a BNC-type antenna connector on an unused marker beacon antenna mounted on the lower fuselage. An annual and pre-buy inspection was performed on the aircraft 2.6 months prior to the accident. The hangar proprietor reported that the aircraft had leaked fuel onto the hangar floor since some time before the inspection, and the aircraft's previous owner had turned off the fuel selector to stop the leaking. The aircraft had flown approximately 10 hours since the inspection.
Probable cause
The failure of maintenance personnel to adequately inspect the aircraft during an annual inspection to detect a chafed and leaking engine fuel supply line.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX98LA067
- Event ID
- 20001211X09460
- Case number
- LAX98LA067
- 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 1998-01-04.
- API snapshot SHA-256: f75899ba82b86e7d939732de247fc241a6cc1d4a291c1d042ede663dd5650f02; retrieved 2026-09-21T20:58:10.553Z.