LAX05FA032 · Piper PA-32R-301T
Piper PA-32R-301T · Accident: in flight collision with terrain/water en route
From Meadows Field (BFL) to Santa Barbara Municipal Airport (SBA)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX05FA032
- 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
- 3 · 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
Piper PA-32R-301T
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-32
- 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
- N803ZG
- Operator
- Juan F. Padilla · private individual
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Meadows Field (BFL), Bakersfield, CATo Santa Barbara Municipal Airport (SBA), Santa Barbara, 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
- In flight collision with terrain/water
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Destroyed
Cause areas
- Pilot in command › Altitude/clearance, 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 upsloping high mountainous terrain during level controlled cruise flight on a night cross-country. Prior to takeoff, the pilot informed the air traffic controller (ATC) that he had received the airport's weather. A broken sky condition existed with layers about 5,500 and 7,000 feet mean sea level (msl). When the pilot subsequently climbed from 4,900 to 5,200 feet and requested information from ATC about the elevation of the clouds, he acknowledged that he "seems to be in a little bit of clouds...sort of in and out." The pilot continued climbing into clearer conditions. The flight continued and the airplane tracked near the centerline of Victor Airway 183, which had a published course of 195 degrees. The pilot was familiar with the roundtrip route between his Santa Barbara home-base airport and Bakersfield, and he had previously flown over the route. During the last few minutes of the radar-recorded flight, the pilot was generally cruising about 6,500 feet, as indicated by the mode C altitude reporting transponder. The pilot was receiving radar flight following service from a controller at the Los Angeles Air Route Traffic Control Center. The controller observed the airplane and was aware that the minimum enroute altitude (MEA) for airplanes on instrument clearances along the airway was 9,000 feet. The controller and the pilot had sectional aeronautical charts available for use that depicted a 6,840-foot msl mountain peak along the flight route. The pilot's course did not vary as he approached and impacted the mountain during the dark nighttime flight. The bearing between the initial point of impact (IPI) and the Santa Barbara Municipal Airport was 197 degrees. Also, the bearing and distance between the IPI and the main wreckage was 198 degrees and 0.25 miles. The controller did not issue a terrain-related safety alert, as required by a Federal Aviation Administration order.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to select and maintain an adequate terrain avoidance cruise altitude. Contributing factors were the dark nighttime conditions, the rising mountainous terrain, and the Federal Aviation Administration controller's failure to issue a terrain-related safety alert.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX05FA032
- Event ID
- 20041119X01844
- Case number
- LAX05FA032
- 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 2004-11-11.
- API snapshot SHA-256: b48a1fea212e5198b45531fd7a0fec62368d4738c29e993654fd02a04cbdf478; retrieved 2026-09-20T18:12:24.407Z.