NYC03LA044 · Luscombe 8F
Luscombe 8F · Accident: total loss of engine power (mechanical failure) en route
From Wiscasset Airport (IWI) to Newport Sky Park Airport (ME68)
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC03LA044
- 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
Luscombe 8F
- Aircraft type
- Luscombe 8
- 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
- N1484B
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Wiscasset Airport (IWI), Wiscasset, METo Newport Sky Park Airport (ME68), Newport, ME
- 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 · 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)
- 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
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Engine assembly, cylinder › Fatigue
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
While descending to land the engine lost total power. The cabin of the airplane began to fill with smoke, and the pilot performed a forced landing to the airport. During the descent, the airplane struck trees and impacted a snow bank. Examination of the airplane revealed a hole along the outer wall of the number one cylinder barrel. The number one cylinder was forwarded to the Safety Board Materials Lab for examination. The lab noted that the fracture was in the cylinder barrel between the 3rd and 6th cooling fins from the mounting flange. Major portions of the fracture contained fatigue features that initiated from the radius between the 3rd and 4th fins approximately in line with the exhaust valve. There was no evidence of defects at the origin area of the fatigue cracking. The cylinder had accumulated about 530 hours of total operation.
Probable cause
The fatigue failure of a the cylinder wall.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC03LA044
- Event ID
- 20030130X00127
- Case number
- NYC03LA044
- 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: 5f807a5443ccb8505016403c504e6f7f32fe655f9404ca8cc7b60490ac64a971; retrieved 2026-09-21T09:31:34.724Z.