NYC03LA168 · Air Tractor AT-301
Air Tractor AT-301 · Accident: partial loss of engine power (mechanical failure) en route
From Green Acres Airport (1A1) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC03LA168
- 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
Air Tractor AT-301
- Aircraft type
- Air Tractor AT-301
- 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
- N23820
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Green Acres Airport (1A1), Livingston, NYTo 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 137: Agricultural
- 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
- Partial 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
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Engine assembly, cylinder › Failure
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 was in cruise flight when the engine began to vibrate and lose power. The pilot not able to maintain altitude, and performed a forced landing to a field. The airplane was equipped with a Pratt and Whitney R1340 radial engine. Examination of the engine revealed that approximately 50 percent of the number eight cylinder head was separated from it's respective cylinder barrel. Review of maintenance records revealed that the engine had been operated for about 930 hours since it was overhauled and about 20 hours since it's most recent annual inspection. At the time of the annual inspection, a mechanic reported he examined the cylinders and did not detect any cracks.
Probable cause
A loss of engine power due to a failure of the number eight cylinder.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC03LA168
- Event ID
- 20030731X01239
- Case number
- NYC03LA168
- 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: f09dee8fb974e3b9ba90771f13fa6220e4a5fa4945cdd19b561fd3e458c319d1; retrieved 2026-09-21T19:24:29.599Z.