LAX94FA009 · North American T-6G
North American T-6G · Accident: in flight collision with terrain/water while maneuvering
From Van Nuys Airport (VNY) to General William J Fox Airfield (WJF)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX94FA009
- 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
- 2 · 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
North American T-6G
- Aircraft type
- North American T-6
- 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
- N7765C
- Operator
- Francis W. Elliot · private individual
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Van Nuys Airport (VNY), Van Nuys, CATo General William J Fox Airfield (WJF), Lancaster, 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
- Maneuvering · turn to reverse direction
- 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
- 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
- Visual flight rules (VFR) flight into instrument meteorological conditions (IMC)
- 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(cfi) › Proper altitude, not maintained
- Pilot in command(cfi) › VFR flight into imc, inadvertent
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The CFI planned to check out his student, who was a foreign country airline pilot, in the North American T-6G. The CFI planned to fly in a northward direction to Lancaster, which required traveling over rising mountainous terrain. At departure, a broken ceiling existed with a 3,000-foot msl base. Witnesses observed the northbound T-6G flying below the clouds and maneuvering up a canyon. Seconds before the airplane made a 180-degree course reversal turn and impacted the side of a mountain, it was observed flying in a northward direction 100 to 200 feet over a home and just below the cloud bases. The visibility was estimated at 0.25 miles, and the crash site elevation was about 3,600 feet msl.
Probable cause
the CFI's failure to maintain the proper altitude while flying over mountainous terrain, and his inadvertent flight into instrument weather conditions. Contributing factors were the CFI's improper in-flight decision to fly at the low altitude and his misjudged evaluation of the weather.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX94FA009
- Event ID
- 20001211X13581
- Case number
- LAX94FA009
- 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: 55a4293b5272f783df36b918bc1b842c70f662ad53afd0d08755e714baefafc8; retrieved 2026-09-21T00:21:12.650Z.