LAX02LA197 · Piper PA-22-135
Piper PA-22-135 · Accident: total loss of engine power (mechanical failure) during takeoff
From Q21 · Brownsville, CA to Q21 · Brownsville, CA
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX02LA197
- 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
Piper PA-22-135
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-22
- 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
- N3329B
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Q21 · Brownsville, CATo Q21 · Brownsville, CA
- 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
- Takeoff
- 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)
- 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 › Airspeed, not maintained
- Reason for occurrence undetermined
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane impacted terrain during an attempted return to runway maneuver following a loss of engine power shortly after departing the airstrip. A witness observed the pilot takeoff and, when the airplane was about 800 feet above ground level, he heard the engine sputter. The airplane made a turn to the left, which was consistent with the pilot attempting to return back to the runway. The engine stopped completely, and the airplane's bank attitude increased. As the airplane continued in a turn, the airspeed became slow and the left wing appeared to lose lift. The airplane stalled into the ground, with the nose impacting the terrain vertically. Upon impact, a post impact fire consumed the airplane. The pilot's neighbor recalled talking to the pilot about 15 minutes prior to the accident flight. She stated that the pilot expressed to her that he was having trouble with the airplane, and that he could not seem to identify what the problem was. The pilot was reportedly performing the maintenance on the airplane. The airplane's engine had been running rough, which the pilot was attributing to be a result of water in the fuel system, or due to a carburetor problem. No mechanical discrepancies were found in the thermally destroyed wreckage.
Probable cause
a loss of engine power for undetermined reasons. Also causal was the pilot's failure to maintain an adequate airspeed during a turn to reverse course back to the runway, resulting in a stall and collision with terrain.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX02LA197
- Event ID
- 20020621X00953
- Case number
- LAX02LA197
- 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: b3726ec3b3412805a1882ffa6b09e2f554cc8f87435d7355791270bb4fb9a2db; retrieved 2026-09-20T19:59:45.854Z.