LAX04LA060 · Cessna 172S
Cessna 172S · Accident: loss of engine power en route
From Q99 · San Martin, CA to Monterey Regional Airport (MRY)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX04LA060
- 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 172S
- 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
- N396TA
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Q99 · San Martin, CATo Monterey Regional Airport (MRY), Monterey, 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
- 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
- Reason for occurrence undetermined
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 nosed over during a forced landing in a muddy field following a total loss of engine power. The pilot was en route to Monterey at 2,400 feet mean sea level (msl), in instrument meteorological conditions, when the engine lost power and failed to restart after three attempts. The pilot stated that he had 10 gallons of fuel in the right and left fuel tanks. The airplane remained inverted in the field for a period of time due to the muddy conditions that made access and recovery very difficult. After recovery of the aircraft, 4 gallons of fuel was found in the right tank and 1.75 gallons were in the left tank. The fuel selector was positioned to the "Both" position and fuel was found in all components of the fuel system. Examination of the engine revealed no condition that would have prevented normal operation.
Probable cause
loss of engine power for undetermined reasons.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX04LA060
- Event ID
- 20031216X02049
- Case number
- LAX04LA060
- 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: local date, investigation status, coordinates. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2003-12-07.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 4860f5b97cefa4f2f5952c2108f35fdc91ca1da1fc48b6a8898e7d337b8c863b; retrieved 2026-09-22T08:06:29.843Z.