CHI98LA170 · Kreatz GENESIS
Kreatz GENESIS · Accident: loss of engine power during initial climb
From Y33 to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI98LA170
- 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
- 2 · 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
Kreatz GENESIS
- Aircraft type
- Kreatz GENESIS
- 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
- N68474
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Y33To 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
- Initial climb
- 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
- 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 › Stall, inadvertent
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
Witnesses reported the engine sounded normal during the takeoff roll and that the airplane rotated normally. Witnesses reported the airplane climbed to about 100 to 200 feet when the engine revved up 'really high' to what sounded like 1,000 RPM's higher than normal takeoff power. A witness reported the airplane went into a 60 degree left bank, and then the airplane turned right into an 80 degrees nose dive. The airplane went straight down and did not spin. The stall speed of the airplane was 50 mph. The airspeed indicator was found with the needle stuck at approximately 41 mph. The engine and flight controls exhibited continuity and no pre-impact anomalies were revealed. The engine was modified for airplane use by utilizing a propeller belt reduction drive to reduce the engine RPM's to approximately 2,500 propeller RPM's. The two 30 mm wide reduction drive belts were not found at the impact site. Searches for the drive belts were made of the surrounding area on two separate occasions but without success.
Probable cause
the pilot inadvertently stalled the airplane. A factor was the failed reduction drive belts.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI98LA170
- Event ID
- 20001211X10023
- Case number
- CHI98LA170
- 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: 7f4463c7153ca0a69a57e6b74785f0c17e3f3e96b1b57f140779369109135645; retrieved 2026-09-20T22:34:49.685Z.