ATL05LA071 · Cessna 152
Jacksonville Flying Service Cessna 152 · Accident: loss of engine power en route
From Albert J Ellis Airport (OAJ) to Albert J Ellis Airport (OAJ)
Event
- NTSB case
- ATL05LA071
- 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
Cessna 152
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 152
- 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
- N48820
- Operator
- Jacksonville Flying Service
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Albert J Ellis Airport (OAJ), Jacksonville, NCTo Albert J Ellis Airport (OAJ), Jacksonville, NC
- 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
- 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
- Fuel system › Starvation
- Mixture control, cable › Failure, total
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
According to the certified flight instructor, after the engine run-up, the flight departed runway 23 to practice traffic pattern maneuvers. During the climb out the airplane started to make a "spitting" sound, the engine rpm dropped from 2500 rpm to 1900 rpm, and the airspeed decreased to 60 knots. The certified flight instructor took over the flight controls, and conducted a forced landing. The airplane landed approximately 145 yards off the departure end of runway 23 at which time the nose wheel gear collapsed. Post accident examination of the airplane revealed that the right wing assembly was buckled. The nose gear was broken off of the engine mounts, and the firewall was buckled. Review of maintenance logbooks revealed no record of cable replacement within the 4859 flight hours. Examination of the engine controls revealed that the mixture cable was broken.
Probable cause
The loss of engine power due to the failure of the carburetor mixture cable which resulted in fuel starvation.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ATL05LA071
- Event ID
- 20050420X00479
- Case number
- ATL05LA071
- 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: b80f6bf859db1a7827e3aa4ec421d2bd84fbac7fb197dd37ddcabb442ca071ac; retrieved 2026-09-22T06:06:50.333Z.