DEN00LA134 · Cessna 310D
Cessna 310D · Accident: partial loss of engine power (mechanical failure) during takeoff
From 2V1 to French Valley Airport (F70)
Event
- NTSB case
- DEN00LA134
- 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 310D
- 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
- N674FT
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From 2V1To French Valley Airport (F70), Murrieta, CA
- 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
- Takeoff · roll/run
- 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)
- Also codedOther events the NTSB coded in the sequence, such as a wire strike after a loss of power. Flight Findings uses them for its kinds of event. Glossary
- Stall/mush; Tree(s)
- 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 › Stall/mush, inadvertent
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot initiated his takeoff in the twin-engine airplane with zero flaps on runway 19 with 1,000 feet of the 8,500 foot runway unused behind him. He said that the takeoff ground roll 'seemed too long,' but he felt that he had insufficient runway to abort the takeoff. The pilot said that after takeoff, 'the airplane would not climb or accelerate.' He raised the landing gear and started a slow left turn looking for a place to land between the trees. He said that he remembers seeing 55 mph on the airspeed indicator, and then the airplane dropped and impacted trees. The density altitude was 10,810 feet. A review of aircraft performance charts indicated the airplane should have been able to takeoff with a ground roll of 2,698 feet with a 15-degree flap setting. Postaccident examination of the left engine revealed that the #2 cylinder had no thumb compression. Further examination revealed that the top and face of the exhaust valve had two rust colored burn patterns opposite each other.
Probable cause
The pilot inadvertently stalling the airplane. Factors were the pilot's failure to use the entire available runway, the high density altitude weather condition, and a partial loss of power on one engine due to a burned exhaust valve.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DEN00LA134
- Event ID
- 20001212X21441
- Case number
- DEN00LA134
- 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: b950f15521b37ed8d08a06efefb67efbb94f64f113904b6fca9018be5fd42541; retrieved 2026-09-21T10:33:24.803Z.