LAX01LA237 · Aeronca O-58B
Aeronca O-58B · Accident: in flight collision with terrain/water en route
From Auburn Municipal Airport (AUN) to Calaveras Co Maury Rasmussen Field (CPU)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX01LA237
- 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
- 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
Aeronca O-58B
- Aircraft type
- Aeronca O-58
- 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
- N50912
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Auburn Municipal Airport (AUN), Auburn, CATo Calaveras Co Maury Rasmussen Field (CPU), San Andreas, 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
- In flight collision with terrain/water
- 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
- Reason for occurrence undetermined
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
A witness observed the aircraft descend in controlled, gliding flight and "pancake" onto a rock outcropping. He didn't think the crash site was where a pilot would intentionally land. There were more suitable areas in the nearby vicinity. Earlier in the day the airplane was fueled to capacity (2.5-hours endurance). The pilot had flown to an airport about 50 minutes distant and was returning at the time of the accident. The accident site is about 5 miles from the origin airport. Inspection of the aircraft failed to reveal any mechanical anomaly. An autopsy of the pilot revealed, among the findings: 1) Acute thrombus, diagonal branch of left anterior descending coronary artery; 2) Severe coronary artery atherosclerosis; and 3) Cardiomegaly with left ventricular hypertrophy.
Probable cause
An in-flight collision with terrain for undetermined reasons.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX01LA237
- Event ID
- 20010710X01355
- Case number
- LAX01LA237
- 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: 913a1476a7f4c5d668009e33da40bd09675716067b7d21d153afb2a708f707f6; retrieved 2026-09-20T20:28:35.826Z.