ATL05CA143 · Cessna 402B
Cessna 402B · Accident: loss of engine power en route
From Bessemer Airport (EKY) to FL
Event
- NTSB case
- ATL05CA143
- 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 402B
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 402
- 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
- N1399G
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Bessemer Airport (EKY), Bessemer, ALTo FL
- 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
- 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
- Reason for occurrence undetermined
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight departed the airport on a fairy permit heading southeast. About 25 minutes into the flight, at a cruise altitude of 3500 feet, the pilot noticed a significant loss of power from the left engine followed by the left engine failing. Attempts to restart the engine were unsuccessful and the left engine was feathered. The right engine would not generate more then 29 inches of manifold pressure without running rough. The airplane turned toward Shelby County Airport, the closest airport to the airplane's current position, and the pilot attempted to perform an emergency landing. The airplane continued to lose altitude and at 900 feet the pilot chose to force land on a road, 3 miles southeast of the Shelby Airport. The airplane collided with a raised manhole cover and two roadside objects upon landing. Examination of the airplane found the airplane to the right side of the road with the right gear detached. The right wing had two tears in the leading edge. The left engine was run after the accident for a period of four minutes at 1800 RPM. The prop was cycled out of feather, the magnetos, oil pressure, and fuel pressure were checked. All engine checks were satisfactory to normal standards. The airplane had not been flown in over two years and sat outside a hanger for two weeks prior to being flown with no fuel in either tank. The fuel tanks were filled to capacity the morning of the accident flight. No contaminates were found in the fuel.
Probable cause
The loss of engine power for undetermined reasons.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ATL05CA143
- Event ID
- 20050913X01439
- Case number
- ATL05CA143
- 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: 5e522221ac19f479378b029978126b8c22567f30421f89a1e93dbafec4aab15a; retrieved 2026-09-22T05:29:26.761Z.