MIA99LA203 · Air Tractor 301
Air Tractor 301 · Accident: loss of engine power during takeoff
From M37 to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- MIA99LA203
- 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
Air Tractor 301
- Aircraft type
- Air Tractor 301
- 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
- N2368R
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From M37To 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 137: Agricultural
- 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
- Takeoff
- 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
- 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
- Engine assembly, cylinder › Fatigue
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight was departing from a 3,000 foot runway with a full load of fertilizer. The airplane became airborne, and according to the pilot, the engine lost power. The pilot was not able to maintain altitude, and the airplane impacted the ground about 2,500 feet from the departure end of the runway. The on scene investigation revealed that the No. 4 cylinder exhaust rocker box cover was fractured and missing, and appeared to not have been caused by impact with the ground. The No. 4 cylinder was removed from the engine and sent to the NTSB Materials Laboratory in Washington, D.C., for examination. The laboratory examination revealed that the No. 4 cylinder head had failed from fatigue cracking, probably the result of both mechanical and thermal stresses. It was likely that the fatigue originated first at the corners of the exhaust rocker shaft hole in boss '1', then initiated at localized casting defects in boss '2' as the fatigue in boss '1' grew and the local stresses increased in the remaining structure.
Probable cause
a loss of engine power due to the failure of cylinder No. 4 boss, which was caused by fatigue cracking, resulting in a forced landing in marshy terrain and subsequent nose over.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record MIA99LA203
- Event ID
- 20001212X19320
- Case number
- MIA99LA203
- 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: d6b7f84036451f4b268035dc254bd194d6ec5a78b710ae6a2cf77d09c4e0cd3f; retrieved 2026-09-22T14:24:16.105Z.