LAX06CA244 · Cessna 182D
Cessna 182D · Accident: total loss of engine power (non-mechanical) en route
From O61 · Cameron Park, CA to Whiteman Airport (WHP)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX06CA244
- 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 182D
- 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
- N8961X
- Operator
- John Cardos
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From O61 · Cameron Park, CATo Whiteman Airport (WHP), Whiteman, 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
- Total loss of engine power (non-mechanical)
- 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
- Fuel exhaustion
- 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
- Fluid, fuel › Exhaustion
- Fuel system, cap › Leak
- Fuel system, tank › Siphoning
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 lost power due to fuel exhaustion and the airplane collided with rocks during a forced landing in a riverbed. The pilot refueled the airplane before departure and flew approximately 2 hours before the engine lost power. He switched from the left fuel tank to the right tank and the engine restarted; however, it lost complete power about 10 minutes later. A Federal Aviation Administration inspector examined the airplane at the accident site and recovered a residual amount of fuel from the right tank and no fuel from the left tank. He noted that the right fuel cap O-ring was split and there was heavy blue staining from the fuel cap, aft in a slip stream induced pattern to the trailing edge of the wing.
Probable cause
A loss of engine power due to fuel exhaustion. The fuel exhaustion was the result of a split O-ring on the right fuel cap, which allowed fuel to siphon out of the right fuel tank during flight.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX06CA244
- Event ID
- 20060908X01317
- Case number
- LAX06CA244
- 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: c8dfbbf4e1df2c57b81793e80ee41612f5fc3391e64c82b6f0a2ae7d121a9a86; retrieved 2026-09-22T04:38:46.006Z.