LAX01LA050 · Cessna 182J
Cessna 182J · Accident: partial loss of engine power (mechanical failure) during landing
From Q88 · Paradise, CA to Q88 · Paradise, CA
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX01LA050
- 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
- Unknown
- 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 182J
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 182
- 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
- N182DD
- Operator
- Skydive in Paradise
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Q88 · Paradise, CATo Q88 · Paradise, 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
- Landing
- 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)
- 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
- Fuel exhaustion
- 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
- Fluid, fuel › Exhaustion
- Pilot in command › Fuel supply, inadequate
- Pilot in command › Preflight planning/preparation, improper
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
After discharging three parachutists into a drop zone from about 12,000 feet mean sea level, the pilot attempted to return to the departure airport. The engine began surging as the airplane descended through 8,000 feet. The pilot continued the descent and entered the departure airport's traffic pattern. He misjudged his distance from the runway, and when all engine power was lost turning onto the final approach leg he was unable to glide to the runway. The airplane impacted terrain about 250 feet short of the landing threshold whereupon it nosed over. Regarding the pilot's qualifications, he was 5 months overdue in his performance of a biennial flight review, and he had not flown during the previous 90 days. The pilot had alleged to the firm which used his piloting services that he possessed a commercial pilot certificate and had at least 4,000 hours of flight time. On a May 2000 application for an FAA medical certificate, the pilot indicated that he held a commercial pilot certificate and had 8,100 hours of total flight time. According to the FAA, no record exists of the pilot holding any certificate in the United States other than that of private pilot. The pilot subsequently reported to the Safety Board that he had about 1,905 hours of flight time. A reconstruction of the fuel load carried during the accident flight in concert with the fuel burn off rates revealed that, at the time of the crash, the approximate quantity of fuel on board was 4.4 gallons. According to the Cessna Aircraft Company, the unusable fuel for each tank is 2.5 gallons, or a total of 5 gallons.
Probable cause
Fuel exhaustion during a descent due to an inadequate fuel supply. Contributing factors were the pilot's improper preflight planning, his misjudged altitude while performing the emergency landing, and his lack of certificate qualification and recent flight experience/currency.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX01LA050
- Event ID
- 20001212X22347
- Case number
- LAX01LA050
- 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: fd9e051ab1d363e06d06f7c8978fd838af720415dc1b8963b1ad08c91eab3843; retrieved 2026-09-21T10:18:22.038Z.