Reach Cessna 421C accident
Cessna 421C · Accident: on ground/water collision with object while taxiing
From Meadows Field (BFL) to San Francisco International Airport (SFO)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX03LA088
- 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
- Charter & commuter
- 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 421C
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 421
- 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
- N321FL
- Operator
- Reach
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Meadows Field (BFL), Bakersfield, CATo San Francisco International Airport (SFO), San Francisco, 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 135: Air Taxi & Commuter
- 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
- Taxi · from runway
- 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
- On ground/water 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
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Driver of vehicle › Procedures/directives, not followed
- Driver of vehicle › Visual lookout, inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
A maintenance truck driver failed to observe an airplane that had just landed and was taxing to the ramp on a course perpendicular to the driver's direction of travel. The westbound truck, that was proceeding on a vehicle access road, collided with the leading edge of the northbound airplane's right wing. During a dark night, the pilot had landed on runway 28R. Thereafter, he received a clearance to taxi to the ramp via a specified route. Approaching the designated parking area, the pilot negotiated a right 90-degree turn and again proceeded in a northerly direction toward a fixed base operator's parking area; the airplane's ground track crossed an airport service road. The truck driver failed to comply with published airport procedures by not yielding to the approaching airplane.
Probable cause
The vehicle driver's inadequate visual lookout and failure to follow established procedures. A contributing factor was the dark nighttime condition.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX03LA088
- Event ID
- 20030220X00242
- Case number
- LAX03LA088
- Dataset
- historical-pre2008
- Source SHA-256
- 89e2df6d848e7ab3b42e7d7c7a03ff403303057a26ca04c95b3ea67201c3ce74
Source notes (5)
- 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: 60fb882ca19d423ab422cb3eecaef0c5dd3ea2a554b193cc4b77cba1a74db3c4; retrieved 2026-09-18T15:54:47.675Z.
- The NTSB's operator name is blank for N321FL; the operator shown is the name the NTSB records it doing business as.