LAX02LA244 · Cessna 182P
Cessna 182P · Accident: undershoot during landing
From Auburn Municipal Airport (AUN) to Mokelumne Hill, CA
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX02LA244
- 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
- 0 · 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 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
- N8290G
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Auburn Municipal Airport (AUN), Auburn, CATo Mokelumne Hill, 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
- Landing
- 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
- Undershoot
- 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
- Pilot in command › Flaps, not used
- Pilot in command › Procedures/directives, not followed
- Pilot in command › Proper glidepath, not maintained
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 collided with terrain short of the runway while landing at a private airstrip. The 1,100-foot-long runway has a 5- to 7-percent upgrade to the south. While making a left downwind approach for a short field landing, the pilot had selected 20 degrees of flaps. Just short of the runway, the airplane sank about 10 feet, and "one second" later, the airplane impacted a dirt bank 2 feet short of the north edge of the runway. The pilot stated that "more altitude on final, use of full flaps" could have prevented the accident. The pilot's operating handbook for the airplane calls for a 40-degree-flap setting on short field and normal landings. No mechanical malfunctions or failures with the airplane were reported prior to the mishap.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain the proper glidepath and failure to follow the manufacturer's recommended flap setting of 40 degrees, which resulted in an undershoot short of the runway. Factors include the runway's upslope and short length, which likely created the visual illusion of being high during the approach.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX02LA244
- Event ID
- 20020806X01308
- Case number
- LAX02LA244
- 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: a57827e9ab916d78b4cb34efedad39a0252c0b817020e85228c09fce61534923; retrieved 2026-09-22T10:37:21.647Z.