LAX04LA292 · American Champion (ACAC) 7ECA
American Champion (ACAC) 7ECA · Accident: total loss of engine power (mechanical failure) en route
From O48 · Little River, CA to O48
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX04LA292
- 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 Champion (ACAC) 7ECA
- Aircraft type
- American Champion (acac) 7
- 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
- N11037
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From O48 · Little River, CATo O48
- 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)
- Also codedOther events the NTSB coded in the sequence, such as a wire strike after a loss of power. Flight Findings uses them for its kinds of event. Glossary
- Wire, transmission
- 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
- Ignition system, spark plug › Missing
- Ignition system, spark plug › Undertorqued
- Other maintenance personnel › Maintenance, inadequate
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 collided with transmission wires and terrain during a forced landing following a loss of engine power. The pilot said that while in cruise flight, the engine began a serve vibration and then "exploded." The pilot maneuvered the airplane in a gliding configuration and selected a field to execute a forced landing. While on a final approach to the selected landing surface, the airplane collided with transmission lines and continued to descend toward the field, touching down hard. The top spark plug was absent from the right rear cylinder [the number one cylinder] and several ignition leads were loose. The engine had undergone an annual inspection 1.97 hours prior to the accident. The pilot opined that the accident could have been prevented if the spark plug had been tightened or properly torqued.
Probable cause
maintenance personnel's failure to adequately torque the top spark plug on the number one cylinder, which resulted in a separation of that plug and a loss of engine power.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX04LA292
- Event ID
- 20040817X01241
- Case number
- LAX04LA292
- 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: 1c8c12894155b9a6fbaf6ee895c7ad053b43d27cb8e755fc53456460c9c21a03; retrieved 2026-09-22T06:53:26.183Z.