LAX04LA022 · American AA-1
American AA-1 · Accident: loss of engine power during initial climb
From KQ99 · San Martin, CA to Willows Glenn County Airport (KWLW)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX04LA022
- 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
American AA-1
- Aircraft type
- American AA-1
- 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
- N5968L
- Operator
- Michael D. White · private individual
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From KQ99 · San Martin, CATo Willows Glenn County Airport (KWLW), Willows, 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
- Initial climb
- 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
- Loss of engine power
- 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
- Engine assembly, cylinder › Low compression
- Owner/pilot mechanic › Maintenance, service of aircraft/equipment, not performed
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The student pilot/airplane owner, who is also an aviation mechanic, reported a loss of engine power after takeoff during the initial climb. He said the engine was running rough, and started to lose power. He was unable to maintain altitude, and made a forced landing. The airplane collided with a fence during the landing roll. An examination of the engine disclosed virtually no compression in two of the four cylinders, an absence of an air cleaner, excessively wide gaps on all of bottom spark plugs, and a heavily sooted and fouled number 4 top spark plug. The engine was installed in July, 1978, and had accumulated 2157.5 total operating hours; it has never been overhauled.
Probable cause
The absence of compression in two of the airplane's four cylinders, and the pilot/mechanic's failure to maintain the engine in an airworthy condition, which resulted in a loss of engine power during takeoff-initial climb, and subsequent forced landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX04LA022
- Event ID
- 20031028X01820
- Case number
- LAX04LA022
- 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: 00966bb590a05fb4ec62beb1ba0f5fd268c34275f62fe29fc0e8e602fc166f38; retrieved 2026-09-21T09:21:41.314Z.