LAX06FA186 · Cessna T182T
Cessna T182T · Accident: in flight encounter with weather en route
From Long Beach International Airport (LGB) to Fall River Mills Airport (O89)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX06FA186
- 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
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
Cessna T182T
- 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
- N451JE
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Long Beach International Airport (LGB), Long Beach, CATo Fall River Mills Airport (O89), Fall River Mills, 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 encounter with weather
- 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
- Visual flight rules (VFR) flight into instrument meteorological conditions (IMC)
- 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
- Pilot in command › VFR flight into imc, continued
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 a mountain while in cruise flight. The airplane became the subject of an alert notification (ALNOT) after Oakland Center (ZOA) lost radar and radio contact with the airplane and pilot. The controller working the flight reported that the pilot had cancelled the IFR portion of his flight at 1239, south of Red Bluff, California. The pilot requested visual flight rules (VFR) flight following for the remainder of the flight to his destination. At 1308, the controller reported a loss of radar and radio contact. There were no reports of a distress call from the pilot. A California Highway Patrol (CHP) air unit located the accident site on May 29, 2006, at 0936. It was at the 8,229-foot mean sea level (msl) elevation of an 8,500-foot mountain. The airplane came to rest on a 45-degree slope on top of 6 feet of an ice/snow pack, with some of the wreckage suspended in the nearby trees. The sheriff's department reported that on Saturday when the accident occurred, it was snowing and cloudy on the mountain. Recorded radar data showed the flight level at a mode C reported 10,000 msl for most of the early flight in the southern half of California. The flight then climbed to 12,000 feet for a short time. At the time the pilot cancelled his IFR clearance with Oakland Center, the radar data showed the flight descending normally to about 8,500 feet and on a straight track to the accident site just before the collision with the mountain. Review of the GEOS Weather Satellite image for the area showed that there was cloud coverage over the accident site at the time of the event. Examination of the wreckage did not discover any anomalies that would have precluded normal operation of the airframe or engine.
Probable cause
the pilot's decision to continue VFR flight into instrument meteorological conditions and his failure to maintain clearance from mountainous terrain.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX06FA186
- Event ID
- 20060607X00707
- Case number
- LAX06FA186
- 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: 62649c686c8c5298b70597bb72963c1799b320e94382e3a768f43354696c37b2; retrieved 2026-09-20T17:20:10.612Z.