LAX00LA260 · Cessna 172N
Sunrise Aviation Cessna 172N · Accident: partial loss of engine power (mechanical failure) en route
From John Wayne Orange County International Airport (SNA) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX00LA260
- 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 172N
- 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
- N7598D
- Operator
- Sunrise Aviation
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From John Wayne Orange County International Airport (SNA)To 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
- En route · climb to 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
- Partial loss of engine power (mechanical failure)
- 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
- Engine assembly, valve keeper › Separation
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight instructor and student pilot were taking off to do pattern work prior to soloing the student pilot. Shortly after takeoff, during the initial climb, the instructor noticed that the engine was running very rough and that the rpm's had dropped to about 1,700. He declared an emergency and said he was circling back to land. The control tower told the instructor that they were unable to clear him on the runway he had requested due to departing traffic. The instructor stated that immediately after this, the engine rpm dropped completely and the engine quit. He continued his turn toward the runway, determined that he was not going to be able to make the runway, and elected to set it down in the grass area between the runways. A postaccident examination revealed that the No. 4 cylinder exhaust valve had been ingested into the engine.
Probable cause
The loss of engine power during the initial takeoff climb, at too low an altitude to afford remedial action, because of an ingested valve, and the airplane's subsequent collision with the ground adjacent to the runway.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX00LA260
- Event ID
- 20001212X21283
- Case number
- LAX00LA260
- 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 2000-06-22.
- API snapshot SHA-256: c5ffc5a5a501f2910b2b8b98f111d6e39c4f00b0509e5cc49a8c18a7f3ea8464; retrieved 2026-09-22T12:47:22.654Z.