FTW00LA059 · Piper PA-32-300
Eagle Air Service Piper PA-32-300 · Accident: loss of engine power en route
From Texas Gulf Coast Regional Airport (LBX) to 3R1 · Bay City, TX
Event
- NTSB case
- FTW00LA059
- 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
Piper PA-32-300
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-32
- 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
- N8954N
- Operator
- Eagle Air Service
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Texas Gulf Coast Regional Airport (LBX), Angleton, TXTo 3R1 · Bay City, 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 · 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
- 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
- Pilot in command › Flare, excessive
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane was in level cruise flight during dark night conditions when the 'engine stopped.' The instructor elected to make a forced landing to a field. On final approach, the instructor noticed what appeared to be power lines. The instructor banked the airplane to parallel the power lines and rotated the airplane to a nose high pitch attitude for touchdown. The touchdown was made on both main wheels; however, 'the nose of the aircraft came down hard,' and the airplane skidded to a stop. An FAA inspector supervised a 35-minute test run of the engine and found no anomalies.
Probable cause
The pilot's excessive flare resulting in a hard landing. Factors were the loss of engine power for undetermined reasons, the power lines on final approach and the dark night conditions.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record FTW00LA059
- Event ID
- 20001212X20360
- Case number
- FTW00LA059
- 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: local date, investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2000-01-10.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 77ed20cbc1768df6892d397525f8e8efffee1d7f7fe7d3a38306bea2144e4918; retrieved 2026-09-22T13:24:34.478Z.