MIA06LA066 · Loehle P5151
Loehle P5151 · Accident: total loss of engine power (mechanical failure) during initial climb
From South Lakeland Airport (X49) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- MIA06LA066
- 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
Loehle P5151
- Aircraft type
- Loehle P5151
- 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
- N151RG
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From South Lakeland Airport (X49), Lakeland, FLTo 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 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
- Pilot in command › Flare, delayed
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 shortly after takeoff, and the pilot said he "waited about 1 second too long" before flaring. The airplane landed hard, collapsing the left main landing gear and shearing off the left wing. The fuselage broke in half behind the cockpit. The Rotax 582 UL engine was later disassembled and examined. Numerous discrepancies were observed but most notably was the required factory vent holes were not in the carburetor vent tubes, and the vent tubes were less than 50% of the effective area required to vent the float chambers. Full power could not be achieved during a functional test. After removing the fuel vent tubes from the carburetor float bowl, the engine was restarted and full power was achieved without difficulty.
Probable cause
The pilot's delay in initiating landing flare during a forced landing following a total loss of engine power. A factor was the lack of correct venting of the carburetor float bowl.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record MIA06LA066
- Event ID
- 20060324X00343
- Case number
- MIA06LA066
- 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: f75747ac21c029656f8262042c30b489c6de00ce328d6426a25a700b663ee792; retrieved 2026-09-21T18:48:42.480Z.