LAX03LA003 · Cessna 140
Cessna 140 · Accident: in flight collision with terrain/water while maneuvering
From San Gabriel Valley Airport (EMT) to Corona Municipal Airport (AJO)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX03LA003
- 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 140
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 140
- 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
- N90168
- Operator
- Dean Sibley
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From San Gabriel Valley Airport (EMT), El Monte, CATo Corona Municipal Airport (AJO), Corona, 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
- 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
- Destroyed
Cause areas
- Pilot in command › Altitude, 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 pilot was spotting fish for a boat and lost radio communication. In an attempt to reestablish contact, he attempted a series of low altitude passes. A box pattern was set up, and several attempts to communicate were made without success. The pilot decided to try to drop a message into the boat. The pilot said that he was distracted by the task and fatigued by the nearly 3-hour flight and did not maintain sufficient altitude. When he realized that a collision with the water was imminent, he added power and pulled back on the control yoke but was unable to avoid contact with the ocean surface. He stated that prior to impact, all controls were functioning and responsive and that the engine was operating smoothly and gave no indication of a malfunction. The only anomaly that the pilot could recall was that the engine did not seem to respond after he added power seconds before impact. Due to the low altitude the pilot did not have time to send out a distress call or troubleshoot the engine's lack of response.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain sufficient altitude while maneuvering at low altitude. Factors were the pilot's fatigue and the distraction of trying to drop a message onto a boat.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX03LA003
- Event ID
- 20021011X05316
- Case number
- LAX03LA003
- 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: d45fb5376e22a3f00d1517bb3a40398ae600af71b0a95e885af7aa4a9f3fbf29; retrieved 2026-09-21T09:33:57.578Z.