FTW96LA094 · Cessna A188B
Carson Flying Service Cessna A188B · Accident: total loss of engine power (mechanical failure) en route
From No airport to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- FTW96LA094
- 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 A188B
- 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
- N4744Q
- Operator
- Carson Flying Service
- 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
- 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 (mechanical failure)
- 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 › Airspeed, not maintained
- Pilot in command › Load jettison, not performed
Approximate · Estimated position: the centre of Enid, OK, the place the record names. Not the accident site.
NTSB narrative
The pilot reported that the airplane was on its first flight since completion of maintenance. The aerial application flight had flown less than a mile from its takeoff point, when the engine lost power and the pilot executed a forced landing to a flat soft wheat field. It was also reported to the FAA inspector, that the pilot did not jettison the hopper load, which is part of the emergency landing without engine power procedures for that airplane. The pilot stated that 'when I attempted to flare to land, I lacked enough airspeed to fully stop the descent.' The airplane was structurally damaged during the hard bounced landing. Post impact inspection of the power plant revealed that the fuel line was disconnected from the flow divider.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain sufficient airspeed during the forced landing and to jettison the aircraft's load for a forced landing. A factor was the engine's failure due to a disconnected fuel line which was the result of improper maintenance.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record FTW96LA094
- Event ID
- 20001208X05136
- Case number
- FTW96LA094
- 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: 3bbf5936e438e8cdf9becf5c9af21631aa1c1b568d40714c66fe69d85743a46b; retrieved 2026-09-22T22:54:02.352Z.