LAX05LA159 · Beech 23
Beech 23 · Accident: total loss of engine power (mechanical failure) during initial climb
From Tucson International Airport (TUS) to Pinal Airpark (MZJ)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX05LA159
- 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
Beech 23
- Aircraft type
- Beechcraft 23
- 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
- N2388Q
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Tucson International Airport (TUS), Tucson, AZTo Pinal Airpark (MZJ), Pinal Airpark, AZ
- 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
- Initial climb
- 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
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Mixture control, cable › Fatigue
- Mixture control, cable › Fractured
- Unknown › Maintenance, installation, inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The engine lost power during the takeoff initial climb and the airplane was damaged during a forced landing. The run-up check was uneventful. When the airplane was about 400 feet above ground level turning the left crosswind leg of the airport traffic pattern, the engine lost power completely. The pilot made a forced landing between a taxiway and the perimeter fence on the airport. Post accident test-run of the engine revealed that the mixture control cable was fractured 0.35 inches from the set screw, which attaches it to the carburetor, and the carburetor mixture arm was free to move, uncommanded. This fracture was hidden by the outer sheath that covers the mixture control cable and movement of the cockpit mixture control did not produce corresponding movement of the carburetor mixture arm. With the fracture surfaces realigned, the wire appeared to have been bent nearly 90 degrees from its normally straight path. A scanning electron microscopy (SEM) of both fracture surfaces of the wire revealed the existence of a fatigue crack about 1/4 of the wire's cross-sectional area and perpendicular to the wire's surface. The origin of the fatigue crack was on the outside surface of the 90-degree bend in the wire, which suggests that the crack initiated and propagated during service while the main portion of the wire was under compression loads. The presence of the fatigue crack is indicative of an installation problem, such as overtorquing of the set screw. The fracture of this cable would not allow the pilot to properly set the mixture from the cockpit control to the carburetor.
Probable cause
a loss of engine power due to the fatigue fracture and separation of the mixture control cable. The fatigue crack resulted from inadequate installation techniques by unknown maintenance personnel.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX05LA159
- Event ID
- 20050513X00613
- Case number
- LAX05LA159
- 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: 4c24cf11b6d88befa0f6d57caff633447b5a79acf9a0962a9e9be0b777cd416f; retrieved 2026-09-21T19:01:58.034Z.