LAX01LA281 · Johnson LANCAIR 360
Johnson LANCAIR 360 · Accident: loss of control in flight while maneuvering
From Sacramento International Airport (SMF) to Placerville Airport (PVF)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX01LA281
- 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
- 2 · 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
Johnson LANCAIR 360
- Aircraft type
- Johnson LANCAIR 360
- 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
- N417DJ
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Sacramento International Airport (SMF), SACRAMENTO INTL, CATo Placerville Airport (PVF), Placerville, 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
- 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 as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane dove into a residential property adjacent to the pilot's residence in near-vertical flight. Neighbors believed the pilot intended to fly over his home to alert his wife prior to landing at the nearby airport. The neighbor, in whose front yard the airplane crashed, reported there was a brief whining sound before the crash. When he opened the front door, the wreckage was in his front yard within a few feet of the house. He said there are trees surrounding the location, and the fact that the plane didn't hit any of them told him it had to have come nearly straight down and narrowly missed his house. The wreckage was scattered in a fan-shaped pattern over about 200 feet to the northwest. The engine was embedded into the (very hard) ground about 10 inches in a near-vertical attitude and with the propeller attached. Examination of the wreckage at an impound facility did not reveal any evidence of a preimpact mechanical failure; however, the flight control cables were severed at several locations and it was not possible to determine if the entire aircraft was present due to extensive fracturing of the composite structure. There was no fire.
Probable cause
In-flight loss of control for undetermined reasons.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX01LA281
- Event ID
- 20010821X01740
- Case number
- LAX01LA281
- 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: 84b0a09a959be0cc755e26fb9aea44365b782fecc77c030b8653e81a708a1ce6; retrieved 2026-09-20T20:24:30.658Z.