FTW97LA189 · Townsend KITFOX
Townsend KITFOX · Accident: total loss of engine power (mechanical failure) en route
From Greeley–Weld County Airport (GXY) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- FTW97LA189
- 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
Townsend KITFOX
- Aircraft type
- Townsend KITFOX
- 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
- N950AW
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Greeley–Weld County Airport (GXY), COTo 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
- 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
- Eng assembly, crankshaft counterweights/vib damper › Not installed
- Fluid, oil › Starvation
- Manufacturer › Inadequate quality control
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot was test flying his experimental airplane in the local area when the engine lost partial power then seized. The airplane landed hard, shearing off the right main landing gear and buckling the fuselage. Post accident disassembly of the engine revealed evidence of high heat distress and a lack of lubrication. The builder said he had adjusted the fuel-oil metering system on previous occasions because the engine was difficult to start and operated erratically. Operating temperatures were also high. The engine was further examined by an independent repair facility. They found that the engine did not have a harmonic balancer, which allowed the crankshaft bearings on the magneto end to move within the crankcase. Extreme internal heat build up and oil starvation damaged the crankshaft bearings, rotary valve, disk, and gear, and caused the connecting rod to eventually fail.
Probable cause
The engine manufacturer's inadequate quality control by failing to install the harmonic balancer, causing the engine to fail catastrophically. A factor was the lack of suitable terrain on which to make a forced landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record FTW97LA189
- Event ID
- 20001208X07914
- Case number
- FTW97LA189
- 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: 015dda292ad284559237dd3c702ffff253f08170903ca032748b5a6a9a0db376; retrieved 2026-09-22T19:44:37.056Z.