ATL95LA151 · Cessna 188T
Cessna 188T · Accident: airframe, component or system failure while maneuvering
From No airport to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ATL95LA151
- 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
- Visual Meteorological Cond
Cessna 188T
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 188
- 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
- N731DB
- Operator
- Elliott Parker
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From No airportTo not recorded
- 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 137: Agricultural
- 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
- Maneuvering · aerial application
- 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
- Airframe, component or system failure
- 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
- Electrical system, electric wiring › Arcing
- Fuel system, line › Chafed
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
While en route to spray a field 3 miles from the staging airstrip, the pilot heard an unusual noise in the cockpit. Seconds later, smoke and fire from under the instrument panel started filling the cockpit. The pilot made an emergency landing at the staging airstrip, and exited the burning airplane. The cockpit and center section of the airframe were fire damaged. Examination of the instrument panel disclosed that a fuel line for the fuel flow meter was burnt out of the instrument. Several fire damaged electrical wires were located in the immediate vicinity of the fuel line.
Probable cause
The chafing of the fuel flow gage pressure line with an electrical system wire which resulted in arcing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ATL95LA151
- Event ID
- 20001207X04149
- Case number
- ATL95LA151
- 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: c09db7907364e72756027a9d714b46766f3da0fd0eee1432c31801611fdaf13c; retrieved 2026-09-22T23:27:48.792Z.