CHI00LA243 · Piper PA-36-285
Piper PA-36-285 · Accident: total loss of engine power (mechanical failure) en route
From K75 to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI00LA243
- 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
- 1 · 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-36-285
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-36
- 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
- N57616
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From K75To 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 137: Agricultural
- 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
- 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
- Destroyed
Cause areas
- Pilot in command › Unsuitable terrain or takeoff/landing/taxi area, encountered
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The agricultural airplane was destroyed when it impacted terrain following a gear collapse during a forced landing while returning from spraying operations. The airplane was found resting in a soft farm field of wheat stubble. The pilot was fatally injured. The seat belt cable and shoulder harness cable were found separated. The separated areas exhibited signatures consistent with tensile overload. The pilot was not wearing a helmet and the manual control for the shoulder harness inertia reel was found in the unlocked position. The engine was examined and the number four cylinder was found to be compromised. A portion of the piston pin was protruding through a hole in the cylinder wall. Examination of the number four piston and intake valve revealed that the valve failed due to overstress. Portions of the piston skirt had fractured and separated from the piston. The fracture surfaces on the piston contained severe mechanical damage that obscured the fracture surface features. One side of the piston skirt exhibited damage consistent with the piston rotating about the piston pin and the connecting rod impacting the skirt. No other anomalies were found that could be associated with a preexisting condition.
Probable cause
The unsuitable terrain for landing encountered by the pilot during the forced landing. Factors were the failure of the number four piston and cylinder, the soft terrain, and the main landing gear overload and subsequent collapse.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI00LA243
- Event ID
- 20001212X21671
- Case number
- CHI00LA243
- 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: 3dfd983c75834e5407864222ebcc871e7ba32184af785e32548f895009e9d5dc; retrieved 2026-09-20T20:58:12.213Z.