LAX03LA128 · Cessna 172N
Cableair Cessna 172N · Accident: total loss of engine power (mechanical failure) en route
From Santa Monica Municipal Airport (SMO) to Brackett Field (POC)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX03LA128
- 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 172N
- 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
- N6272D
- Operator
- Cableair
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Santa Monica Municipal Airport (SMO), Santa Monica, CATo Brackett Field (POC), La Verne, 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
- En route · cruise
- 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
- Total loss of engine power (mechanical failure)
- 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
- Company maintenance personnel › Maintenance, installation, improper
- Fluid, oil › Exhaustion
- Fluid, oil › Leak
- Lubricating system, oil quickdrain/drain plug › Not safetied
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
During cruise flight, the engine lost power and the airplane struck a car and then the right wing hit a fence during a forced landing on a freeway. The pilot had rented the airplane for a personal flight. There were no mechanical malfunctions noted on the first leg of the flight. On the second leg of the flight, the pilot noted a drop in engine power followed by a violent shaking of the airframe. The pilot set up for an emergency landing on the freeway. During landing, the airplane impacted a car, which the pilot had not noticed, and a fence. Post accident examination disclosed that oil covered the belly of the airplane and coated the inside of the engine compartment and nose wheel assembly. The engine sustained a catastrophic internal failure. The oil drain plug was missing. The investigation revealed that the engine had been overhauled 5 hours prior to the accident and then reinstalled by the operator's maintenance personnel. The oil drain plug is normally secured with safety wire. No safety wire remnants were found on the engine.
Probable cause
Failure of company maintenance personnel to correctly install and safety wire the oil drain plug, which led to a loss of engine oil and a catastrophic internal failure of the engine.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX03LA128
- Event ID
- 20030422X00545
- Case number
- LAX03LA128
- 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: c7719813fc755b5d9f367f1512d7b4e77a1dedde1e3d6945cc2e08c3bc49525f; retrieved 2026-09-22T09:26:12.340Z.