FTW04LA013 · Prill RV-6
Prill RV-6 · Accident: propeller failure/malfunction en route
From Perot Field/Fort Worth Alliance Airport (AFW) to Las Cruces International Airport (LRU)
Event
- NTSB case
- FTW04LA013
- 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
Prill RV-6
- Aircraft type
- Prill RV-6
- 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
- N3XS
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Perot Field/Fort Worth Alliance Airport (AFW), Fort Worth, TXTo Las Cruces International Airport (LRU), Las Cruces, NM
- 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 · descent
- 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
- Propeller failure/malfunction
- 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
- Reason for occurrence undetermined
- Torquemeter system, shaft type › 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 727-hour private pilot reported that the engine developed a "severe" vibration when the airplane was at about 5,000 feet agl, approximately 15 miles east from the airport. The pilot pulled the throttle back to try to stop the vibration, then pulled the mixture, and pulled the nose up to stop the propeller. He located a pasture to land in; however, he did not see the terraces cut in the pasture that he hit when he landed. He hit the first one and went airborne again, hitting a second one ripping the nose gear back and landing on the nose of the airplane. A tip of one propeller blade was missing and that could not be found.
Probable cause
The failure of the propeller blade for undetermined reason. A contributing factor was the lack of suitable terrain.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record FTW04LA013
- Event ID
- 20031021X01790
- Case number
- FTW04LA013
- 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: 814607179912c476d46b761b4bacf75f85b81357d544110635c2cea067e173b3; retrieved 2026-09-21T19:20:15.854Z.