LAX06LA048 · Cessna 182A
Cessna 182A · Accident: total loss of engine power (mechanical failure) on approach
From Livermore Municipal Airport (LVK) to Gillespie Field (SEE)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX06LA048
- 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 182A
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 182
- 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
- N3936D
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Livermore Municipal Airport (LVK), Livermore, CATo Gillespie Field (SEE), San Diego, 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
- Approach
- 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)
- 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
- Engine assembly, camshaft › Failure
- Engine assembly, camshaft › Fatigue
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The engine experienced a loss of power and the airplane collided with a fence while the pilot was performing a forced landing. As the airplane approached the vicinity of the destination airport, the engine experienced a total loss of power. The pilot made a forced landing on highway about 2 miles from the airport. During the landing roll, the airplane impacted a fence. A post accident examination of the engine revealed that rotation of the crankshaft did not generate rotation of the camshaft. Removal of the starter drive gear assembly revealed that four gear teeth were missing from the camshaft sprocket and one gear tooth was missing from the crankshaft sprocket. The gear teeth were retrieved and sent to the Safety Board Materials Laboratory for examination. The camshaft gear sprocket failed due to fatigue initiating at the root of one of the teeth. Several other teeth had fatigue consistent with secondary initiation due to load shedding from the original failed tooth; the crankshaft gear failure was also secondary. Microstructural examination and hardness testing was performed on a section of a camshaft tooth, which met drawing specifications. A thin layer of decarburization was observed on the surface.
Probable cause
The failure of the camshaft due to fatigue of one of the gear teeth, which resulted in a loss of engine power. Factors were the fence and the fence post.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX06LA048
- Event ID
- 20051206X01937
- Case number
- LAX06LA048
- 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: c6e9015b513b25fa1285909af6b87ffa38c6fa84ba6334d4adfbde6f6b1b9d7b; retrieved 2026-09-22T05:13:27.015Z.