SEA97LA061 · Luscombe 8A
Luscombe 8A · Accident: partial loss of engine power (mechanical failure) en route
From Morgan County Airport (42U) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- SEA97LA061
- 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
Luscombe 8A
- Aircraft type
- Luscombe 8
- 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
- N77947
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Morgan County Airport (42U), UTTo 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 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
- Partial 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
- Mixture control, cable › Disconnected
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
While in cruise at 1,500 feet AGL, the pilot attempted to lean the mixture. He discovered he could not advance the mixture control back into the rich position. Rather, the mixture control would spring back out into an idle position. With the aircraft committed to a reduced power descent, the pilot executed an intentional emergency landing on the westbound lanes of Interstate 84, during which he had to maneuver over an overpass and beneath power lines which crossed the highway. He reported that the landing was hard and during the rollout the aircraft departed the paved surface, veering left across the median, at which time the wheels struck a six inch lip at the edge of the pavement to the eastbound lanes. The aircraft then nosed over. Postcrash examination of the aircraft revealed that the wire-wound sheathing surrounding the mixture control push-pull cable had separated from the solid fitting end which is held firm at the back of the instrument panel. This disconnection allowed the mixture control cable and surrounding wire-wound sheath to flex but prevented the cable from changing the position of the mixture control at the carburetor.
Probable cause
Disconnection of the mixture control wire wound cable sheath. A factor was the abrupt, elevated edge of the highway pavement.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record SEA97LA061
- Event ID
- 20001208X07460
- Case number
- SEA97LA061
- 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: c63fd9e80be13112e3538cb100490bf8669a44c55c07b687bf2a320fc873f420; retrieved 2026-09-22T20:18:30.340Z.