NYC98LA133 · Cessna 170B
Cessna 170B · Accident: loss of control in flight during landing
From N66 to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC98LA133
- 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 170B
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 170
- 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
- N3493C
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From N66To 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
- Landing · aborted
- 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 control in flight
- 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
- Flt control syst, rudder control cable/rod › Separation
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane veered to the right during landing. The pilot attempted a go-around, but had no left rudder response. The airplane continued in a right turn before it settled into some trees about 200 feet from the runway and 110 degrees from the runway heading. Examination of the airplane revealed a broken left rudder cable. The cable was replaced in July 1985, had 454 hours of flight time on it, and was found free of corrosion. Breaks in wire strands varied along a 1-inch section of the cable, and numerous broken strands were bent backwards. The cable break was in the vicinity of where the rudder cable went through a bulkhead, and then through a pulley mounted on the bulkhead's forward side.
Probable cause
The separation of the left rudder cable. A factor was chafing of the cable.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC98LA133
- Event ID
- 20001211X10404
- Case number
- NYC98LA133
- 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: fda90b732ee4e5e7653b40887e8205096bca3c5d79e86512796fd22ba84bde2c; retrieved 2026-09-22T17:37:43.632Z.