LAX01LA043 · Cessna 210K
Cessna 210K · Accident: loss of engine power en route
From Chino Airport (CNO) to Santa Maria Public Airport Captain G Allan Hancock Field (SMX)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX01LA043
- 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 210K
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 210
- 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
- N8118G
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Chino Airport (CNO), Chino, CATo Santa Maria Public Airport Captain G Allan Hancock Field (SMX), Santa Maria, CA
- 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 · descent
- 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
- Loss of engine power
- 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, gear › Fractured
- Maintenance, rebuild/remanufacture › Inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
During the initial approach descent from cruise altitude, the engine lost power. The pilot richened the fuel mixture, which increased the engine vibrations. The pilot noticed the manifold pressure dropping and reduced the throttle. As power was reapplied, vibrations of a higher magnitude occurred. Los Angeles ARTCC (air route traffic control center) was notified of the emergency and directed the pilot to the nearest airport for landing. After considering the distance to the closest airport, the pilot decided to put the airplane down in a vacant dirt lot. The engine was installed the previous May and the postcrash inspection revealed a broken cam gear. The new engine was a factory remanufactured Continental IO-550. It replaced the original Continental IO-520, and its installation was authorized under a supplemental type certificate (STC).
Probable cause
Failure of the internal cam gear in the remanufactured engine. A factor was the congested obstacles in the forced landing area.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX01LA043
- Event ID
- 20001212X22307
- Case number
- LAX01LA043
- 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: 108ede25e6cd8a64b3f7941f6b8b51f42790a1e60a10b47fdf38db28ad8c7bb7; retrieved 2026-09-22T12:19:49.686Z.