LAX04LA174 · Mitsubishi MU-2B-26A
Mitsubishi MU-2B-26A · Accident: airframe, component or system failure during landing
From Lake Havasu City Airport (KHII) to Brackett Field (KPOC)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX04LA174
- 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
Mitsubishi MU-2B-26A
- Aircraft type
- Mitsubishi MU-2
- 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
- N81MF
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Lake Havasu City Airport (KHII), Lake Havasu, AZTo Brackett Field (KPOC), 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
- Landing
- 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
- Airframe, component or system 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
- Pilot in command › Directional control, 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 twin turboprop airplane landed hard collapsing the nose gear, and causing substantial damage to the airframe. The pilot said that about 6-7 miles from the airport, in the terminal descent, he noticed the right engine torque meter read zero. This had occurred before, and the torque would come back if he manipulated the throttle. He continued the normal approach for landing. In the landing flare the airplane yawed right despite his corrective left rudder pedal input. The airplane landed hard, bouncing on the nose twice, breaking the nose wheel strut. It then slid about 2,000 feet down the runway. The ferry pilot, who flew the airplane to the repair facility after the accident, said that the engine power levers were consistently split throughout the entire ferry flight. In order to have the engine power perimeters matched, the right power lever had to be about 2 inches forward of the left one and this positional relationship was constant from flight idle to full power. Maintenance records had no record of compliance to Mitsubishi Service Bulletin No. 097/73-001, which was published "to assure the engine and propeller rigging is adjusted within manufactures specifications and to prevent potential degraded flight handling qualities associated with the flight idle power being set asymmetrically or too low."
Probable cause
the pilot's failure to adequately compensate for an asymmetrical thrust condition and to maintain directional control during the landing flare. The owner/pilot's failure to comply with the applicable service bulletin concerning propeller/power control rigging was a factor.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX04LA174
- Event ID
- 20040415X00472
- Case number
- LAX04LA174
- 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: 3b0bec7098991c5c344b4f1a9a807d378b0fde3ef151a52ec55439bc28ee20c1; retrieved 2026-09-22T07:48:33.328Z.