NYC00LA029 · Bellanca 17-30A
Bellanca 17-30A · Accident: loss of engine power during initial climb
From Canandaigua Airport (D38) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC00LA029
- 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
Bellanca 17-30A
- Aircraft type
- Bellanca 17
- 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
- N93688
- Operator
- Thomas O'Connell
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Canandaigua Airport (D38)To 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
- 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
- Fuel system › Contamination
- Pilot in command › Aircraft preflight, inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
As the airplane was taking off, the engine quit, and the pilot attempted to land on the remaining runway. The airplane touched down, bounced back into the air, and then floated over a road located at the end of the runway. While in the air a second time, the engine began to develop partial power for a few seconds and quit again. The airplane came to rest in a plowed field. When the airplane was examined, all six wing drain petcocks were disabled. Contamination was observed in the wing tanks, gascolator, fuel lines, fuel distribution manifold, engine driven fuel pump, and fuel filter. Research of the airplane records revealed that AD 87-11-01 R1, which was issued to preclude engine power loss due to either the accumulation of water or other contaminates in the fuel system, was not complied with. Further inspection revealed that the cable and release assembly that drains the gascolator was disassembled, rendering the quick drain inoperative. According to the airplane's logbooks, the most recent annual inspection was completed 23 months prior to the accident.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadequate preflight which resulted in a loss of power due to fuel contamination. Factors related to the accident were the pilot's non-compliance of an airworthiness directive, failure to perform an annual inspection, and improper modifications of the fuel drain system.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC00LA029
- Event ID
- 20001212X20156
- Case number
- NYC00LA029
- 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: 15d126c66476bcefb2ff59ba683f05f5e112ca0f612dfb3bfdd779f02ce83c41; retrieved 2026-09-21T20:21:09.746Z.