MIA02LA124 · Mckean Varieze
Mckean Varieze · Accident: loss of engine power en route
From Covington Municipal Airport (M04) to M04
Event
- NTSB case
- MIA02LA124
- 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
Mckean Varieze
- Aircraft type
- Mckean VARIEZE
- 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
- N57EZ
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Covington Municipal Airport (M04), Covington, TNTo M04
- 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
- Fuel starvation
- 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
- Pilot in command › Lack of familiarity with aircraft
- Pilot in command › Planned approach, improper
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot said that he only had about 0.2 hours total flight experience in the accident airplane and during the first flight, the engine surged so he returned to the airport and executed an uneventful landing. After landing, he said he operated the airplane on the ground, trying to determine the cause of the engine surges and was unable to duplicate the problems so he again flew the airplane to see if the surges would reoccur. During the climbout, when the airplane reached 3,700 feet, while in a left turn, "crossing the numbers for runway 01", the pilot said the engine began to surge again, and the engine rpms dropped to 1,600, and any subsequent attempts to control engine power were unsuccessful. He said he extended the downwind in order to dissipate altitude for a forced landing, but he descended below some wires which stretched across his flight path to the airport, so he executed a forced landing to a road short of the runway instead. During the landing the airplane's winglet caught some corn stalks on the side of the road, and the airplane spun around, coming to rest inverted in a corn field, incurring substantial damage. An FAA inspector stated that he and an FAA designated Airworthiness representative examined the accident airplane, and no evidence of mechanical failure or malfunctions were found with any of the airplane systems. The inspector also stated that the designated airworthiness representative told him that he had been present when the pilot was getting ready to take off, and that the fuel selector had been left on the 3-gallon capacity header tank position, and after the accident, while assisting in extricating the pilot from the overturned airplane, the designated representative stated to him that he found the fuel selector still set to the header tank position.
Probable cause
The pilot's improper planned approach following loss of engine power due to fuel starvation resulting in damage to the airplane during an off-airport landing. Contributing to the accident was the pilot's lack of familiarity with the accident airplane.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record MIA02LA124
- Event ID
- 20020709X01070
- Case number
- MIA02LA124
- 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: 4a0d4a4fd05d9a0af8b3913f5b8ff168d8d20f6b278d17040df45101446a6f9c; retrieved 2026-09-22T10:46:23.867Z.