LAX00LA063 · Cessna 172G
Riverside Air Service Cessna 172G · Accident en route
From Laughlin Bullhead International Airport (IFP) to Riverside Municipal Airport (RAL)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX00LA063
- 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 172G
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 172
- 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
- N3690L
- Operator
- Riverside Air Service
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Laughlin Bullhead International Airport (IFP), Bullhead City, AZTo Riverside Municipal Airport (RAL), Riverside, 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 · 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
- Miscellaneous/other
- 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
- Pilot in command › Became lost/disoriented
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot reported that, 2 hours 15 minutes after takeoff, the airplane's electrical generator failed and the airplane subsequently experienced electrical power failure. He said the engine then began to run rough. The recently licensed private pilot was not certain of his position and he made a precautionary landing at dusk on a county road. As the airplane touched down, the left wing struck a street sign which deflected the airplane across the highway median and across the (opposite direction) traffic lanes. The accident occurred 2 hours 45 minutes after takeoff. The airway distance from the departure airport to the intended destination was 167 nautical miles, and the distance to the accident location was approximately 142 nautical miles. Subsequent examination and a test run of the engine revealed no reason for the reported roughness.
Probable cause
The failure of the pilot to maintain positional awareness, which resulted in his becoming lost and disoriented. Contributing factors were the pilot's delay requesting assistance from air traffic control and the failure of the airplane's electrical generator.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX00LA063
- Event ID
- 20001212X20383
- Case number
- LAX00LA063
- 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 2000-01-03.
- API snapshot SHA-256: d98efcb253ae10b7d9e13cce281191ab14289ca1215de861b605a33411ba668a; retrieved 2026-09-22T13:28:04.623Z.