DEN01FA152 · North American SNJ-5
North American SNJ-5 · Accident: total loss of engine power (non-mechanical) while maneuvering
From Raton Municipal Airport / Crews Field (RTN) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- DEN01FA152
- 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
- 2 · 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
North American SNJ-5
- Aircraft type
- North American SNJ-5
- 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
- N2686D
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Raton Municipal Airport / Crews Field (RTN), Raton, NMTo 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 (non-mechanical)
- 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
- 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 › Stall, inadvertent
- Reason for occurrence undetermined
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
Pilot-witnesses said the pilot was performing low-level aerobatics. As he pulled up into a near-vertical attitude he radioed, "My engine just quit." Smoke was seen coming from the engine cowling. The airplane appeared to do a tail slide, then it rolled left and nosed over. Witnesses surmised that the airplane stalled with insufficient altitude to recover. It struck the ground in a left wing-low, nose-low attitude. Wreckage was spread in a fan-shaped pattern. The pilot's wife (and his aerobatic partner) believed he was making a "yo-yo turn...essentially, a steep wingover." To test her theory, she later flew her airplane and performed several of these maneuvers. She found that she could cause the engine to quit by pulling up steeply, then pushing over into a dive for several seconds. Power would suddenly surge to 2,500 rpm. The pilot's wife surmised that the engine failed when he pulled up. As he recovered, the engine regained power and surged, and the resultant torque caused the airplane to roll. No anomalies were noted during the engine disassembly and inspection.
Probable cause
a nonmechanical total loss of engine power for undetermined reasons while performing an aerobatic maneuver, and an inadvertent stall. A contributing factor was the insuffieient altitude to effect a safe recovery.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DEN01FA152
- Event ID
- 20010904X01856
- Case number
- DEN01FA152
- 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: local date, investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2001-08-25.
- API snapshot SHA-256: d7ab087dbbe893650e2e91e6085553561c6f4a2598c4e47870a986342b79fcce; retrieved 2026-09-20T20:23:46.120Z.