LAX98LA122 · Cessna TU206F
Cessna TU206F · Accident: loss of engine power during initial climb
From Catalina Airport (AVX) to John Wayne Orange County International Airport (SNA)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX98LA122
- 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 TU206F
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 206
- 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
- N9674G
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Catalina Airport (AVX)To John Wayne Orange County International Airport (SNA), Santa Ana, 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
- Initial climb
- 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
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Fuel system, fuel flow divider/distributor › Contamination, other than water
- Fuel system, screen › Contamination, other than water
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot reported that the day before the accident the aircraft had been refueled. The flight had one intermediate stopover to retrieve documents before continuing on to its final destination. No mechanical anomalies were noted en route to the first point of landing. The pilot conducted another preflight inspection, with no abnormalities noted, and then departed for his final destination. At the departure end of the runway, the aircraft lost engine power and the pilot made a forced landing in a box canyon and came to rest after colliding with a barbwire fence. An engine repair station examined the engine and noted foreign debris in the flow divider, fuel screen, and metering valve.
Probable cause
Contamination of the fuel system which led to a loss of engine power. Factors were the lack of suitable terrain for the forced landing and the barbwire fence.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX98LA122
- Event ID
- 20001211X09720
- Case number
- LAX98LA122
- 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: 7091f2bd72f912ec11c7dc9c3b8bb1d776fcc7e1f195916c5b2b878ecc275b35; retrieved 2026-09-22T17:57:54.848Z.