LAX01LA286 · Cessna 172L
Cessna 172L · Accident: in flight collision with object en route
From 40E · Tucson, AZ to UNKNOWN
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX01LA286
- 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
Cessna 172L
- 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
- N4312Q
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From 40E · Tucson, AZTo UNKNOWN
- 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 object
- 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 airplane entered a dive and impacted a residence during what witnesses reported was a controlled descent. A post crash fire consumed the airplane. The airplane departed a private airpark during a time following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when VFR general aviation flights were prohibited. The airplane was observed entering a nosedive until it disappeared behind a tree line. The local authorities were told the pilot was having problems with his personal life. The pilot's wife told the local authorities that the pilot had never flown the accident airplane before, and that the airplane hadn't been flown for 5 years. Toxicological tests of samples from the pilot tested positive for prescription antidepressant medications. While the sheriff's department found evidence that the pilot had threatened suicide in the past, neither they nor the medical examiner found evidence to support a suicide by the pilot, and ruled the death as accidental.
Probable cause
the pilot's controlled descent into a residence for undetermined reasons.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX01LA286
- Event ID
- 20010920X01972
- Case number
- LAX01LA286
- 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: a515e0998a8256a8cc41010fd06d0d0d6c290dec6e3f8fe7a361b1752584db5c; retrieved 2026-09-20T20:20:52.989Z.