LAX06FA091 · Cessna 182P
Cessna 182P · Accident: in flight collision with terrain/water en route
From Eastern Sierra Regional Airport (BIH) to Lone Pine/Death Valley Airport (O26)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX06FA091
- 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
- 1 · 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 182P
- 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
- N6034J
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Eastern Sierra Regional Airport (BIH), Bishop, CATo Lone Pine/Death Valley Airport (O26), Lone Pine, 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, 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 a hill about 34 miles north of the destination airport. The accident occurred under dark, nighttime, visual meteorological conditions. The airplane was en route on a 57-mile cross-country flight through a valley. The pilot frequently used the airplane to commute between the departure and destination points, accruing thousands of hours in the valley. The airplane wreckage was on a hill with about a 25-degree slope and located about 275 feet below the ridgeline's top. A heavily traveled highway was situated adjacent to the hill in the same north-south orientation as the route of flight. The wreckage distribution path was 400 feet long on a magnetic bearing of about 340 degrees. An examination of the impact ground scars disclosed that the airplane was in controlled flight in a near level configuration when it collided with the terrain. At the time of the accident, the moon was 3.7 degrees above the eastern horizon but blocked by mountains to the east. It is likely the lights from the automobiles on the highway would have been visible to the pilot, but there were no lights to distinguish the rising terrain. During the wreckage examination of the airframe's structure and the engine, no evidence of any preimpact failures or malfunctions was found.
Probable cause
the pilot's failure to maintain an adequate terrain clearance altitude during a cruise descent that resulted in controlled flight into terrain (CFIT). Factors in the accident were the rising mountainous terrain, the dark nighttime lighting condition.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX06FA091
- Event ID
- 20060125X00119
- Case number
- LAX06FA091
- 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 2006-01-18.
- API snapshot SHA-256: bb6fdbb07de6676a91830d9ef94e3c7331a1f2b1c79021bb9a1a2f915b8a24ed; retrieved 2026-09-20T17:35:53.950Z.