DEN00LA066 · Cessna 310C
Cessna 310C · Accident: total loss of engine power (mechanical failure) while maneuvering
From Cedar City Regional Airport (CDC) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- DEN00LA066
- 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 310C
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 310
- 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
- N3311H
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Cedar City Regional Airport (CDC)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
- Maneuvering
- 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
- Total 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
- Mixture control, cable › Failure, total
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight instructor said that he shut down the right engine to practice single engine flight. Attempts to restart the engine were unsuccessful (it was later determined that the mixture control cable had failed). The pilot did not feather the right engine, and he reported that the left engine was providing insufficient power to maintain flight. The flight instructor performed a gear down landing in the rough, brush covered desert. The owner of the airplane said that the practice engine shut down was performed at 9,500 feet mean sea level, or approximately 3,800 feet above the terrain. He said that the practice maneuver was not initiated over a landing airfield, but that two were available within 5 miles of this location. The airplane's Owner's Manual performance section indicates that the single engine best rate of climb would be from 50 feet per minute to 250 feet per minute, depending on altitude and outside air temperature. A manufacturer's representative said that a non-feathered propeller would reduce the rate of climb by approximately 400 feet per minute, and landing gear extended would reduce it an additional 300 feet per minute.
Probable cause
The failure of the right engine mixture control cable, which prevented the pilot from restarting the engine. Contributing factors were the pilot's failure to follow procedures by not feathering the right propeller, the rough terrain, and the high vegetation.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DEN00LA066
- Event ID
- 20001212X20621
- Case number
- DEN00LA066
- 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: 2c36c5f45277236cdd274d5f0755dbdddb3673ce34c7649ebf445dd602a1f6e3; retrieved 2026-09-22T13:02:09.975Z.