FTW00LA058 · Cessna A185F
Cessna A185F · Accident: partial loss of engine power (mechanical failure) en route
From LVJ to East Texas Regional Airport (GGG)
Event
- NTSB case
- FTW00LA058
- 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 A185F
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 185
- 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
- N999SW
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From LVJTo East Texas Regional Airport (GGG), Longview, TX
- 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 · climb to 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
- Partial loss of engine power (mechanical failure)
- 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
- Engine assembly, cylinder › Separation
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane was climbing through 3,500 feet after departure when the pilot heard a sequence of loud bangs. The pilot stated that the airplane started to vibrate, therefore, he elected to pull the throttle to idle and returned to the departure airport. The pilot stated that he could not make it to the active runway and elected to land on a grass strip located on the airport. The pilot attempted to slow the airplane before impacting a ditch. The airplane nosed over at 40 knots, coming to rest inverted. Examination of the engine revealed that the #4 cylinder head separated from its cylinder barrel as a result of fatigue cracking originating in the cylinder head threads. The engine was overhauled 111.5 hours prior to the accident, at which time, 6 channel chromed overhauled cylinders were installed. It could not be determined how many hours the cylinders had accumulated or how many times they had been overhauled. There is no requirement to track cylinder hours or overhaul occurrences.
Probable cause
the loss of engine power during climb as a result of fatigue cracking of the #4 cylinder head and its subsequent separation from its barrel.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record FTW00LA058
- Event ID
- 20001212X20359
- Case number
- FTW00LA058
- 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: 57edb38ca0cd1c34dc0fc236e206daac10c5faea6b7c250168b37e297d8f1f79; retrieved 2026-09-22T13:27:53.648Z.