LAX07LA140 · Cessna 182Q
Cessna 182Q · Accident: loss of control in flight en route
From McClellan-Palomar Airport (CRQ) to Chandler Municipal Airport (CHD)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX07LA140
- 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 182Q
- 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
- N97287
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From McClellan-Palomar Airport (CRQ), Carlsbad, CATo Chandler Municipal Airport (CHD), Chandler, AZ
- 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 · climb to 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
- Loss of control in flight
- 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 › Aircraft control, not maintained
- Pilot in command › Spatial disorientation
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
After takeoff on runway 24, air traffic control instructed the pilot to climb and maintain 5,000 feet, turn to a heading of 060 degrees, and proceed direct to a navigation aid. The pilot acknowledged the controller's instruction. Approximately 2 minutes later, the controller asked what the pilot was doing and there was no response. A witness observed the airplane coming out of the base of a 700-foot overcast cloud layer in a steep nose down attitude just before it impacted the ocean. The airplane and the pilot were not recovered from the water. According to acquaintances, the pilot had recently began to get into flying again. On a medical certificate dated 4 months prior to the accident, the pilot reported 0 flight hours in the preceding 6 months. The pilot's flight time records were not located and the investigation could not establish the pilot's recent flying experience or instrument currency. According to the weather observations and reports, the tops of the overcast layer were 2,000 feet.
Probable cause
the pilot's loss of control due to spatial disorientation.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX07LA140
- Event ID
- 20070510X00544
- Case number
- LAX07LA140
- 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: ed2ed4982f8483f8c7cd47a12ea18c29263f46412fd5b30ce497ddc88668d423; retrieved 2026-09-20T16:41:12.372Z.