LAX07FA272 · Grumman American AA-5
Grumman American AA-5 · Accident: in flight collision with terrain/water en route
From Big Bear City Airport (L35) to L80 · Joshua Tree, CA
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX07FA272
- 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
Grumman American AA-5
- Aircraft type
- Grumman American AA-5
- 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
- N119G
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Big Bear City Airport (L35), Big Bear City, CATo L80 · Joshua Tree, 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 · descent
- 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
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Pilot in command › Clearance, not maintained
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot had informed his girlfriend that on the accident flight he was going to stay out longer than normal for night currency. Following the VFR night cross-country flight, the pilot initiated a descent for his destination airport. While descending, the airplane, in a wings-level attitude, struck hilly terrain 57 feet below the top of a 2,973 foot ridgeline. The accident flight was between two airports, which was a frequent flight for the pilot. Extracted GPS data confirmed a normal descent profile to the pilot's home airport. Due to a local power outage, which also impacted the airport, the pilot was descending without the benefit of the ground illumination. The pilot also had not reset his altimeter to the destination airports current altimeter setting, which resulted in the altimeter indicating a higher than actual altitude.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain terrain clearance during descent. Contributing to the accident were dark night conditions and mountainous terrain.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX07FA272
- Event ID
- 20070927X01460
- Case number
- LAX07FA272
- 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. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2007-09-12.
- API snapshot SHA-256: dc589fb83a68103d1ba1aae71308cd5458a9749792b68add0d50680b9cdc4913; retrieved 2026-09-20T16:18:05.809Z.