LAX00LA291 · Piper PA-28R-200
Piper PA-28R-200 · Accident: undershoot on approach
From John Wayne Orange County International Airport (SNA) to Catalina Airport (AVX)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX00LA291
- 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
Piper PA-28R-200
- 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
- N200EG
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From John Wayne Orange County International Airport (SNA), Santa Ana, CATo Catalina Airport (AVX)
- 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
- Approach · VFR pattern final
- 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
- Undershoot
- 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 › Compensation for wind conditions, inadequate
- Pilot in command › Proper glidepath, not maintained
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot said that the 10-knot crosswind was 45 degrees off the runway heading, and that the approach seemed normal using the VASI as a glide slope guide. The airport is on top of a mountain with three sides that are bordered by steeply down sloping terrain. As he flew over the cliff on short final approach to runway 22 he encountered a downdraft, which caused him to lose 30 feet of altitude. He applied full power and pitched up but was unable to prevent contact with the weeded area short of the runway. The first 2,000 feet of runway 22 slopes up, with the remainder level.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadequate compensation for the downdraft condition and subsequent failure to maintain proper glide path. A factor in the accident was the upsloping runway and nature of the terrain around the runway, which presented an optical illusion and lead the pilot to believe he was high.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX00LA291
- Event ID
- 20001212X21767
- Case number
- LAX00LA291
- 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: d79db69c64253f90a4833293c1f144d9fbec035491bb60a1700cf4bb6c6b1164; retrieved 2026-09-22T12:36:30.213Z.