LAX00LA080 · Cessna 310F
Cessna 310F · Accident: in flight collision with terrain/water during landing
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX00LA080
- 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 310F
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 310
- 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
- N5801X
- Operator
- David John Rodius
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo 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
- Landing
- 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
- 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
- Dual student › Throttle/power control, improper use of
- Pilot in command(cfi) › Remedial action, delayed
- Pilot in command(cfi) › Supervision, inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight departed for a local area instructional flight with a dual student and passengers onboard. The student pilot was on final approach to the runway, and was approximately 50-feet above ground level, when the flight instructor said he noticed the airplane was descending much too fast. He told the student pilot to add some power but the student pilot added power only to the right engine. The flight instructor took over the controls as the airplane yawed off the runway approximately a wingspan's length. The instructor said he pulled the airplane back to about 20 feet above ground level and crabbed it and flew it back down to touchdown on the runway. A post flight inspection of the airplane revealed wrinkles in the left wing.
Probable cause
The dual student's improper use of the throttles; the flight instructor's inadequate supervision; and the delayed remedial action by the flight instructor. Factors in the accident were the directional control and proper alignment not maintained by the dual student during the landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX00LA080
- Event ID
- 20001212X20395
- Case number
- LAX00LA080
- 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: 45cd637a35a7a99034a13c3c5b05ecaa8db6916da10a9ce5254b1b8aeaeae24d; retrieved 2026-09-22T13:20:27.896Z.