LAX01GA057 · Cessna 182P
Cessna 182P · Accident: loss of control in flight en route
From Fresno Yosemite International Airport (FAT) to General William J Fox Airfield (WJF)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX01GA057
- 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
- Government
- 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 182P
- 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
- N182ER
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Fresno Yosemite International Airport (FAT), Fresno, CATo General William J Fox Airfield (WJF)
- 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
- Public Aircraft
- 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 control in flight
- 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
- Reason for occurrence undetermined
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The commercial pilot lost control of the single engine airplane during a rapid descent to the arrival airport, and impacted the ground in a near vertical attitude at very high speed. The pilot reported he was 7 or 8 miles from the airport at 8,500 feet msl, and was inbound for landing. The controller asked the pilot if he would be able to descend from his position. The pilot answered, "Yeah, if I could do right traffic, I'll go into a imitation of a rock, see what I can do." The controller told the pilot to enter a left downwind leg at a midfield position, and issued the wind conditions, which were reported as 270 degrees at 25 knots. Several witnesses, within a mile of the accident site, reported seeing the airplane as being in a steep, nose down attitude at a rapidly increasing rate of descent. The airplane maintained a perpendicular, nose down attitude until they lost sight of the airplane behind low scrub brush. About the same time they lost sight, they reported seeing a dust cloud rise in the same vicinity. The dust cloud quickly dissipated in the gusting surface winds. The airplane's mode C radar data depicted the airplane descending at a rate of 5,500 feet per minute between the last two radar returns, which were spaced 12 seconds apart. The airplane's last radar return was depicted as 4,900 feet msl (2,545 feet above the ground). Co-workers described the following procedure used by the mishap pilot to lose altitude quickly: reduce power and slow airplane to 120 knots; position propeller control full forward; allow the engine temperatures to normalize; and trim airplane nose down to achieve an indicated airspeed near Vne (redline - Never Exceed Speed; 176 knots). It was reported the pilot learned this from other pilots who took parachutists to altitude. No pre-accident anomalies were noted with the airframe and engine during the examination. The main wings and all fixed and movable primary and secondary control surfaces were accounted for at the impact site. No evidence was found to support a physiological incapacitation. Investigators considered the possibility of some combination of airplane attitude and speed aerodynamically blanking the empennage surfaces; however, no evidence to support such a conclusion was found.
Probable cause
the pilot's in-flight loss of control for undetermined reasons.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX01GA057
- Event ID
- 20001218X45439
- Case number
- LAX01GA057
- 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, coordinates. 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: c59d42973c9a56c40aff2fbf826f0d1817b0745baa27179da2e059614505f9cf; retrieved 2026-09-18T14:36:29.815Z.