LAX00FA168 · Beech D35
Beech D35 · Accident: in flight collision with terrain/water en route
From Santa Paula Airport (SZP) to Stellar Airpark (P19)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX00FA168
- 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
- 1 · 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
Beech D35
- Aircraft type
- Beechcraft 35
- 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
- N2086D
- Operator
- Robert R. Kelsey · private individual
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Santa Paula Airport (SZP), Santa Paula, CATo Stellar Airpark (P19), Chandler, AZ
- 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
- 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 › Distance/altitude, not maintained
- Pilot in command › In-flight planning/decision, improper
- Pilot in command › VFR flight into imc, performed
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
On a dark night, en route from California to Arizona, the pilot cruised into rising terrain in a mountain pass. The crash site, elevation 3,560 feet mean sea level (msl), was adjacent to and about 0.5 miles north of a state highway, elevation 3,000. An overcast sky condition existed with cloud bases between 3,200 and 3,400 feet msl. No one reported witnessing the accident. A hillside resident located about 1/3-mile downslope from the crash site reported that, about the time of the accident, his 3,200-foot msl home was shrouded in ground fog. The pilot was instrument rated but was not current. His last logged instrument flight was 7 years earlier. The FAA reported that the pilot did not file a flight plan, obtain a weather briefing, or communicate with any FAA facility during the flight. The on-scene wreckage examination revealed the airplane initially impacted upsloping terrain in a near level flight attitude. The airplane came to rest upside down about 750 feet from the initial point of ground impact. No evidence of mechanical malfunction was found with the airplane.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain terrain clearance while cruising up a mountain pass, on a dark night, in IMC conditions, and his improper in-flight decision to perform a VFR flight in the inclement weather.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX00FA168
- Event ID
- 20001212X20837
- Case number
- LAX00FA168
- 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 2000-04-22.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 5dc674b56cbaef4ce3130060bfbed4533d0c5862ad6414bc31ba063304d48ed3; retrieved 2026-09-20T21:17:56.832Z.