DEN99FA081 · Piper PA-23E-250
Piper PA-23E-250 · Accident: loss of engine power en route
From Tucumcari Municipal Airport (TCC) to Albuquerque International Sunport (ABQ)
Event
- NTSB case
- DEN99FA081
- 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
Piper PA-23E-250
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-23
- 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
- N54263
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Tucumcari Municipal Airport (TCC)To Albuquerque International Sunport (ABQ), Albuquerque, NM
- 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
- 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
Approximately 5 minutes after taking off, the pilot told air traffic control that his 'left engine was smoking badly,' that he had feathered the propeller, and was returning to land. As the airplane made its approach, the pilot was advised that his landing gear was still retracted. He said he would make a go-around. Witnesses could not recall if an engine had been shut down, but they did say that there was no smoke coming from either engine. They watched the airplane bank left on base leg and descend into the ground. Examination of the propeller governors disclosed the right (not the left) propeller had been feathered. Disassembly and examination of both engines disclosed no mechanical discrepancies or failures.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadvertent stall. A factor was the loss of power of one engine in the twin-engine airplane.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DEN99FA081
- Event ID
- 20001212X18742
- Case number
- DEN99FA081
- 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: c784d572e58cd500675d04b30eb633f6d2e9512699f9ddb88f1db92e325c09c5; retrieved 2026-09-20T22:07:11.936Z.