CHI97FA272 · Kellums SONERAI 1
Kellums SONERAI 1 · Accident: loss of engine power en route
From Butler Field (IN46) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI97FA272
- 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
- 1 · 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
Kellums SONERAI 1
- Aircraft type
- Kellums SONERAI 1
- 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
- N76457
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Butler Field (IN46), INTo 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
- Loss of engine power
- Also codedOther events the NTSB coded in the sequence, such as a wire strike after a loss of power. Flight Findings uses them for its kinds of event. Glossary
- Stall/spin
- 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
- Pilot in command › Airspeed(vs), not maintained
- Reason for occurrence undetermined
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
A witness on the airport saw the student pilot takeoff to the south and perform a normal climbout. The witness said that the pilot was a 'stickler for following the rules' and felt that the pilot turned eastbound to enter the traffic pattern. Another witness who was near the accident site said she 'heard the airplane's engine cut out.' The witness said that when she looked south toward where she heard the sound, she 'saw the airplane come straight down.' The student pilot had approximately 9.0 hours total flying time in the airplane. All 9.0 hours was as pilot-in-command. The student pilot had accumulated approximately 200 to 300 hours in ultralights. Examination of the airplane's engine revealed an 'unusually large amount of carbon in the cylinders. The carbon was dry - a type associated with too rich of a fuel mixture.' No other anomalies were found with the airplane.
Probable cause
a loss of engine power for undetermined reasons, and the student pilot's failure to maintain airspeed greater than the stalling speed for the airplane. A factor relating to this accident was the student pilot's lack of total experience.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI97FA272
- Event ID
- 20001208X08567
- Case number
- CHI97FA272
- 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: b19aa812c6b0058f8114850678b1193c25464c82ee8ff316b79b139bca870b39; retrieved 2026-09-20T22:50:56.924Z.