LAX01LA250 · Piper PA-34-200
Piper PA-34-200 · Accident: fire on approach
From Chandler Municipal Airport (CHD) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX01LA250
- 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
- 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
- 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-34-200
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-34
- 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
- N15120
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Chandler Municipal Airport (CHD), Chandler, AZTo 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
- Approach · VFR pattern final
- 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
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Other maintenance personnel › Maintenance, installation, improper
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
A fire erupted in the right engine nacelle during a maintenance check flight following replacement of the engine. The pilot shutoff the engine and feathered the propeller; however, before he could complete the emergency checklist, black smoke began entering the cockpit via a fresh air vent in the leading edge of the wing near the nacelle. The visibility in the cockpit dropped to about 1 foot and the pilot couldn't see outside, or the instrument panel, or any controls. He declared an emergency and opened the pilot's window. He instructed his passenger to crack open the main door; however, his passenger couldn't find the door handles in the dense smoke. After a period of time he got the door cracked open and the smoke cleared. At that point they were down to 300 or 400 feet agl, and he identified an open field in which an emergency landing was made. Examination of the right-hand engine revealed it was mechanically intact; however, a hose-end "B-nut" at the inlet to the engine driven fuel pump exhibited an unusual number of exposed threads. The B-nut was loose and required 1 1/8 turns to finger-tighten and 1 1/4 turns to snug tighten with a wrench. When the B-nut was unscrewed from the fitting, the threads of the fitting and the B-nut itself did not exhibit any cracks or stripped threads. No other mechanical anomalies were found.
Probable cause
The failure of maintenance personnel to properly tighten a fuel line fitting during an engine installation resulting in a fuel leak and fire during the maintenance checkflight. A factor in the accident was inadequate inspection of the installation prior to return to service.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX01LA250
- Event ID
- 20010723X01481
- Case number
- LAX01LA250
- 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: fb2b9f5a3dfb4719886122212cfd9607a4d85796919a22032a68b36b66f831d7; retrieved 2026-09-21T19:54:10.815Z.