LAX01FA129 · Cessna 172N
Justice Aviation Cessna 172N · Accident: loss of control in flight while maneuvering
From Santa Monica Municipal Airport (SMO) to Santa Monica Municipal Airport (SMO)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX01FA129
- 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
- 3 · 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 172N
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 172
- 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
- N2838E
- Operator
- Justice Aviation
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Santa Monica Municipal Airport (SMO), Santa Monica, CATo Santa Monica Municipal Airport (SMO), Santa Monica, 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
- Maneuvering · turn to reverse direction
- 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
- Pilot in command › Aircraft control, not maintained
- Pilot in command › Spatial disorientation
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane impacted the water descending at a high rate of speed. On a dark moonless night, the noninstrument rated private pilot rented an airplane and flew below a marine layer of clouds along the coastal shoreline. The pilot initiated a course reversal turn, during which the airplane turned away from the city lights. During the turn, seconds after the airplane was headed nearly perpendicular to the shoreline, the pilot commenced a descending right turn with a vertical descent rate of over 2,100 feet per minute. A witness about 1 mile away reported that the airplane looked as though it was falling straight down into the water. The pilot had taken his primary flight lessons from a Texas-based school, and he was, by his own admission, not familiar with flying around marine cloud layers. No evidence of mechanical malfunction or failures was noted during the wreckage examination.
Probable cause
the pilot's loss of airplane control while maneuvering due to spatial disorientation. Contributing factors were the dark night, the marine cloud layer that restricted the pilot's cruising altitude, and the pilot's lack of familiarity with nighttime flight over the ocean.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX01FA129
- Event ID
- 20010407X00718
- Case number
- LAX01FA129
- 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: local date, investigation status, coordinates. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2001-03-29.
- API snapshot SHA-256: b9790c8c828706bfd0a9f9fbac2bc4c136deae86fbb3284f18d03f19729f5fc8; retrieved 2026-09-20T20:37:38.676Z.