LAX00FA314 · Piper PA-28-140
Piper PA-28-140 · Accident: in flight collision with terrain/water en route
From Gillespie Field (SEE) to UNKNOWN
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX00FA314
- 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
Piper PA-28-140
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-28
- 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
- N428FL
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Gillespie Field (SEE), El Cajon, CATo UNKNOWN
- 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
- 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 › Flight into known adverse weather, intentional
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The aircraft impacted a mountain ridge at 2,375 feet msl. A witness, who held a private pilot certificate, was hiking atop the mountain and heard the aircraft approach and impact the mountain about 200 to 300 yards from his position. The witness reported there was a solid stratus cloud layer in the valley below, with the cloud tops about 100 feet below the peak of the mountain [2,696 feet msl]. As he listened, the airplane approached from the south and passed nearby to the west. The aircraft was near but was not visible to the witness. The engine "was running healthy and normally at or near full power." Next he heard a "loud, muffled thud," there was an explosion, and then an orange fireball was visible from near the top of the clouds. Overcast cloud bases were at 1,000 feet msl at the nearest weather reporting point, 9 miles south. Recorded radar data for the last 1 minute 37 seconds of the flight, showed the aircraft, initially, westbound at 1,500 feet climbing to 1,800 feet, about 1 mile south of the accident site. The airplane then made a right turn to a northerly heading and, in the final minute, climbed from 1,800 feet to 2,400 feet. The last radar return was near the accident site with the aircraft at 2,400 feet. The pilot received an outlook weather briefing the evening before the accident that accurately forecast the weather conditions at the time of the accident. No mechanical anomalies were found with the aircraft.
Probable cause
The pilot's intentional flight into known adverse weather.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX00FA314
- Event ID
- 20001212X21755
- Case number
- LAX00FA314
- 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: bf107bbe38ed5d597e2019072ae62c880b2c5ed8a69c71c1b963d31d103f91a0; retrieved 2026-09-20T20:54:26.708Z.