LAX05FA106 · Piper PA-28-181
Piper PA-28-181 · Accident: in flight collision with terrain/water while maneuvering
From L12 · Redlands, CA to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX05FA106
- 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-28-181
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-28
- 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
- N2954P
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From L12 · Redlands, CATo not recorded
- 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
- Maneuvering
- 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 › Clearance, 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 airplane impacted mountainous terrain in a box canyon during a local area instructional night flight approximately 1 hour after nautical twilight ended. The operator reported that the purpose of the flight was for the private pilot, who obtained his certificate 1 month ago, to obtain night Visual Flight Rules (VFR) experience with an instructor on board. The flight was scheduled to fly in the local area and to make night landings at several local airports. Friends of the pilot reported they heard the airplane fly over the private pilot's residence about 1900. The witness said he could see the strobe lights of the airplane, but could not see the airplane registration number due to the low clouds that were in the area. The wreckage site was on a slope in a box canyon, about 100 feet below the ridgeline top, at an elevation of 4,168 feet mean sea level. The private pilot had a total logged flight time of 95 hours, with 3.5 hours of dual instruction received during night conditions. The certified flight instructor had a total logged flight time of 435 hours, with 22 flight hours logged during night conditions. He logged 23 hours in the local area, 2.8 of which were under night conditions. No mechanical abnormalities were found with the airplane or engine during the investigation.
Probable cause
The failure of the private pilot and the flight instructor to maintain adequate terrain clearance while flying in unfamiliar mountainous terrain in dark night conditions.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX05FA106
- Event ID
- 20050310X00293
- Case number
- LAX05FA106
- 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 2005-03-01.
- API snapshot SHA-256: e29ec911f02a38f03e440687f8f0598ac6878e55b38b3f4c9b70ecafdf7ac19f; retrieved 2026-09-20T18:06:27.381Z.