IAD99LA035 · Mooney M20C
Mooney M20C · Accident: total loss of engine power (non-mechanical) en route
From Essex County Airport (CDW) to St Clair County International Airport (PHN)
Event
- NTSB case
- IAD99LA035
- 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
- 0
- 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
Mooney M20C
- Aircraft type
- Mooney M20
- 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
- N5878Q
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Essex County Airport (CDW), Caldwell, NJTo St Clair County International Airport (PHN), Port Huron, MI
- 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)
- 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 › Flight into known adverse weather, intentional
- Weather condition › Icing conditions
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot departed on a VFR flight with IMC and icing conditions forecast and reported along his route of flight. The pilot filed an IFR flight plan en route and entered IMC conditions. Shortly thereafter, the pilot experienced a loss of engine power that could not be corrected by application of carburetor heat. The pilot reported a loss of cabin heat at the onset of the emergency. Cabin heat was drawn from the same source as carburetor heat, upstream of the carburetor. An AIRMET for icing issued prior to departure called for: Light to occasional moderate rime icing in-clouds below 8,000 feet. Conditions continuing beyond 1600 through 2200. A National Weather Service Area Forecast issued for the route of flight was for overcast ceilings at 2,000 to 3,000 feet with tops to 12,000 feet, occasional light snow showers. Weather reported 10 miles southeast of the accident site, was: few clouds at 200 feet with a broken ceiling of 700 feet and an overcast ceiling at 1,100 feet. Visibility was 1/4 mile in light snow and freezing fog. The winds were from 250 degrees at 23 knots gusting to 31 knots. The airplane was not equipped with de-icing or anti-icing equipment.
Probable cause
was the pilot's intentional flight into known icing conditions.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record IAD99LA035
- Event ID
- 20001205X00333
- Case number
- IAD99LA035
- 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. 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: 6d00131c319e062082149d485e34e485a33616b0708e8e8e70fb1baee5015275; retrieved 2026-09-21T20:34:59.350Z.