MIA02LA110 · Harrison Pietenpol Air Camper
Harrison Pietenpol Air Camper · Accident: loss of engine power en route
From Bainbridge, GA (no airport) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- MIA02LA110
- 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
- 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
Harrison Pietenpol Air Camper
- Aircraft type
- Harrison PIETENPOL AIR CAMPER
- 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
- N7224X
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Bainbridge, GA (no airport)To 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
- En route · climb to 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
- Loss of engine power
- 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
- 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
- Destroyed
Cause areas
No findings designated as a cause are recorded in the NTSB data yet.
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
Shortly after takeoff and climb, at an altitude of about 300 feet, the pilot noticed the passenger in the front seat turn around in his seat to look backwards, and almost simultaneously the throttle came to idle and would not respond. The pilot said that it appeared that the front seat passenger had "...apparently used the connecting throttle linkage for a hand hold and broke or disconnected it" from the seat in the rear cockpit. With no power and almost at stall speed the pilot leveled off and crashed straight ahead into a wooded area. During the examination of the wreckage, it could not be ascertained whether the throttle was jammed or disconnected, due to impact damage, and the demolished condition of the airplane.
Probable cause
a loss of power due to the passenger's inadvertent deactivation and restricting the movement of the throttle, which resulted in a forced landing and subsequent impact with trees.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record MIA02LA110
- Event ID
- 20020617X00895
- Case number
- MIA02LA110
- 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, coordinates. 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: 48e1534ff0a5fe4484de9bb823d97aa8e47b4781aff0c00d541fd11f47bd337b; retrieved 2026-09-20T19:59:50.155Z.