WPR23LA264 · Cessna A185F
Cessna A185F · Accident en route
From Montgomery-Gibbs Executive Airport (MYF) to Brown Field Municipal Airport (SDM)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR23LA264
- 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
- Event fatalities
- Unknown
- 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 A185F
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 185
- 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
- N1839R
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Montgomery-Gibbs Executive Airport (MYF), San Diego, CATo Brown Field Municipal Airport (SDM), San Diego, CA
- Aircraft age
- About 49 years (built 1974)
- 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
- Defining eventThe 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
- Unknown or undetermined
- 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
- Aircraft › Aircraft power plant
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot departed the airport to relocate the airplane to another nearby airport. The pilot calculated he would need about 5 gallons of fuel to complete the flight. The pilot stated he planned to refuel at another local airport. He stated that one month before the accident, the fuel tanks were filled. He reported that he did not visually check each tank's fuel level during his preflight, but the fuel gauges indicated there was about 16 gallons of fuel on board. About 1,700 ft mean sea level (msl), the pilot reported that the engine had lost power during cruise flight. The engine briefly gained power for about 10 seconds before losing all power again. The pilot decided to land the airplane in a residential area and the right wing struck a powerline on landing approach and crash-landed in a parking lot. Subsequently, the airplane struck a fence and dense vegetation and came to rest in a ravine. The airplane's fuselage and wings were substantially damaged. Postaccident examination of the airplane and engine did not reveal any preimpact mechanical anomalies. Due to the damage sustained to the engine, an engine run was not performed. Since the pilot did not visually inspect the amount of fuel in both tanks before the accident flight, it is possible that the engine had a fuel starvation or exhaustion event due to an unreliable fuel gauge; however, the reason for the total loss of engine power could not be determined.
Probable cause
A total loss of engine power for undetermined reasons.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR23LA264
- Event ID
- 20230710192582
- Case number
- WPR23LA264
- Dataset
- full-current
- Source SHA-256
- 5cf380f0061817c0331a6b2d8cc7e0ee3a79bea469a1001dc5c10e56f35f5ab3
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, cause areas. 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: 3840276ee7031506ae0f9d93d0280e09cf4b189f424d60dbf0ff8554e7ae8f86; retrieved 2026-09-16T17:50:15.074Z.