DEN06CA081 · Grumman G-164B
Grumman G-164B · Accident: total loss of engine power (mechanical failure) during initial climb
From Dighton Airport (K65) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- DEN06CA081
- 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
Grumman G-164B
- Aircraft type
- Grumman G-164
- 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
- N14RY
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Dighton Airport (K65), Dighton, KSTo 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 137: Agricultural
- 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
- Engine assembly, rocker arm/tappet › Fractured
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane was taking off on an aerial application flight. Shortly after lifting off, the airplane's engine lost power. The commercial pilot set the airplane down on the runway toward the departure end. The airplane went off the end of the runway and into a wheat field. The airplane's main gear tires sank into the soft wet soil and the airplane subsequently nosed over causing the engine to fracture and separate from the fuselage and crushing the vertical stabilizer and rudder downward. The pilot sustained minor injuries. Visual meteorological conditions prevailed at the time of the accident. An examination of the airplane's engine revealed that the rocker arm boss on the number 1 cylinder had fractured leaving the exhaust valve on the cylinder closed and resulting in the subsequent engine failure.
Probable cause
The broken rocker arm boss causing the number 1 cylinder exhaust valve to stay closed and subsequently the engine failed. A factor contributing to the accident was the soft field the airplane set down in.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DEN06CA081
- Event ID
- 20060705X00861
- Case number
- DEN06CA081
- 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. 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: 804589566be1af00d2592cb395aa2494dd5768168b46599ea400f518fd05a7e0; retrieved 2026-09-21T18:45:32.588Z.