NYC06IA143 · Cessna 172S
King Aviation Cessna 172S · Incident: propeller failure/malfunction on approach
From Mansfield Municipal Airport (1B9) to Mansfield Municipal Airport (1B9)
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC06IA143
- 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
- Incident
- 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 172S
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 172
- 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
- N2138W
- Operator
- King Aviation
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Mansfield Municipal Airport (1B9), Mansfield, MATo Mansfield Municipal Airport (1B9), Mans, MA
- 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
- Approach · IFR missed approach
- 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
- Propeller failure/malfunction
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Minor
Cause areas
- Propeller system/accessories, blade › Foreign object damage
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The commercial pilot was conducting a practice missed approach under instruction, when a propeller blade separated. The flight instructor took control of the airplane and shut down the engine to prevent further damage. He then made a Mayday call and glided the airplane to a successful runway landing. A postflight examination of the airplane revealed that the propeller blade was separated about 12 inches from the center of the hub. Metallurgical examination of the remaining fracture face revealed fatigue cracking that emanated from an indentation at the blade's leading edge. The fatigue crack propagated through approximately 50 percent of the fracture face, and beyond that, there was a band of overstress cracking. There was no evidence of corrosion, and a chemical analysis of the propeller blade revealed that the hardness and chemical composition of the blade met the requirements of the applicable engineering drawing. The flight instructor stated that during the airplane's preflight inspection, both he and the commercial pilot visually inspected the propeller blade, and ran their hands along the leading and trailing edges with no anomalies noted. The most recent maintenance inspection of the propeller occurred about 1 month before the incident.
Probable cause
Foreign object damage to the leading edge of the propeller blade, which resulted in fatigue cracking and subsequent blade failure.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC06IA143
- Event ID
- 20060720X00975
- Case number
- NYC06IA143
- 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: 2c100ed2d0cd241308cb7572123a0a7cf9e0a3fbd492f407d1ffff4f159bad34; retrieved 2026-09-22T04:47:48.028Z.