WPR26LA037 · Grumman American AVN. CORP. AA-5B
Grumman American AVN. CORP. AA-5B · Accident: loss of engine power (total) during initial climb
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR26LA037
- 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
- Ongoing
- 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
Grumman American AVN. CORP. AA-5B
- 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
- N74323
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 50 years (built 1975)
- 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
- Initial climb
- 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
- Loss of engine power (total)
- 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
No findings designated as a cause are recorded in the NTSB data yet.
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
On October 29, 2025, about 1820 Pacific daylight time, a Grumman American AA-5B, N74323, was substantially damaged when it was involved in an accident near Santa Ynez, California. The commercial pilot was not injured. The airplane was operated as a Title 14 Code of Federal Regulations Part 91 personal flight.
The pilot stated that the purpose of the flight was to maneuver the airplane within and above the traffic pattern of the airport. The pilot departed from runway 26 and began following the noise-abatement climb-out procedures. During the initial climb, the engine began to operate abnormally and, after about three seconds, experienced a total loss of power.
The pilot further stated that he maneuvered the airplane in a shallow turn back toward the airport. He determined that the airplane would be unable to maintain sufficient altitude to return to the runway and began searching for an area to conduct an off-airport landing. He elected to touch down in a vineyard just outside the airport perimeter and secured the cockpit by retarding the mixture to full OFF. During the accident sequence, the airplane collided with grapevines and fence posts, which resulted in substantial damage to the left horizontal stabilizer.
According to a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) inspector who performed an initial examination of the airplane, the fuel tanks were ruptured as a result of the impact. The inspector was able to drain liquid from the inboard fuel tanks, and the recovered sample was clean of debris and similar in odor to fuel. An external examination of the engine revealed no evidence of holes or catastrophic damage.
The wreckage was retained for further examination.
Verbatim NTSB factual narrative from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR26LA037
- Event ID
- 20251104201956
- Case number
- WPR26LA037
- 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: local date, investigation status, coordinates. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2025-10-30.
- API snapshot SHA-256: f3f5aa2fb89db408aa5c308df7184b00c63b316ab4b0bae70f6772c841a5b479; retrieved 2026-09-16T20:31:20.034Z.