CHI03LA052 · Havir Avid Flyer
Havir Avid Flyer · Accident: total loss of engine power (mechanical failure) en route
From Cambridge Municipal Airport (CSB) to Caransebeş Airport (CSB)
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI03LA052
- 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
Havir Avid Flyer
- Aircraft type
- Havir AVID FLYER
- 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
- N248H
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Cambridge Municipal Airport (CSB), Cambridge, NETo Caransebeş Airport (CSB)
- 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
- Total loss of engine power (mechanical failure)
- 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
- Engine assembly, cylinder › Seized
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane was destroyed when it impacted terrain during a forced landing. According to the pilot rated passenger, there were no problems with the airplane during the run-up. During initial climb through 200-300 feet above ground level, there was a gradual loss of all engine power. The passenger stated that there was no rotation of the propeller. The pilot then turned the airplane back towards the airport, but they did not have enough altitude to reach the runway. The passenger reported that he did not know if they were stalled but said they were coming down at a steep descent. Examination of the engine revealed that the cylinder walls exhibited scoring consistent with repetitive thermal seizures. The manufacturer recommends that the engine be overhauled every five years or 300 hours. The last entry relating to the engine's conditional inspection stated that the owner understood this recommendation. The engine exceeded the recommended time to be overhauled. The pilot's last logbook entry dated about a year before the accident indicated a total flight time of 242.6 hours, of which 47.4 hours were in the accident aircraft.
Probable cause
The inadvertent stall by the pilot following a total loss of engine power and the seizure of the engine. A factor to the accident was the engine overhaul not performed in accordance with the manufacturer's recommendations.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI03LA052
- Event ID
- 20030114X00064
- Case number
- CHI03LA052
- 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: 10a98001e2b9b0d69469d4a8e862a8f5857b16e115b9512225c0a98ec67b5cac; retrieved 2026-09-20T19:31:35.727Z.