NYC01IA126 · Piper PA-31-350
Piper PA-31-350 · Incident: fire while taxiing
From Fort Wayne International Airport (FWA) to Newark Heath Airport (VTA)
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC01IA126
- 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
- Incident
- 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
- Unknown
- 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
- Charter & commuter
- WeatherVisual meteorological conditions (VMC): good enough to fly by looking outside. Instrument conditions (IMC): cloud or low visibility, flying by instruments. Glossary
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
Piper PA-31-350
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-31
- 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
- N4078L
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Fort Wayne International Airport (FWA), Fort Wayne, INTo Newark Heath Airport (VTA), Newark, OH
- 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 135: Air Taxi & Commuter
- 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
- Taxi · from runway
- 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
- Fire
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Minor
Cause areas
- Company maintenance personnel › Maintenance, service bulletin/letter, not complied with
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
After landing, while taxing back to the ramp area, the pilot observed a fire in the left engine. He secured the engine and evacuated the airplane. Examination of the engine revealed that the fuel boost pump was leaking. At the time, the pump manufacturer had a service bulletin to inspect, and retorque if necessary, four screws that secured the pump valve assembly. Examination and testing of the pump at the manufacturer's facility revealed that the wrong set of four screws had been torqued. Discussions between the pump manufacturer and airplane operator revealed that there was some ambiguity in the current service bulletin, and the maintenance personnel were confused at to which four screws the bulletin referred to. Subsequently, the pump manufacturer revised the service bulletin.
Probable cause
The company maintenance personnel's failure to comply with the service bulletin, which resulted in a fuel boost pump leakage and subsequent fire during taxi. A factor was the manufacturer's confusing service bulletin.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC01IA126
- Event ID
- 20010523X01007
- Case number
- NYC01IA126
- 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: 0f295f3cdbdd8a013c3e0a8e3a733fb3ba3c2713b87848b9e372309fb6af73f6; retrieved 2026-09-18T16:14:55.829Z.