NYC07LA001 · Piper PA-24-250
Piper PA-24-250 · Accident: total loss of engine power (mechanical failure) on approach
From Cross Keys Airport (17N) to Hammonton Municipal Airport (N81)
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC07LA001
- 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
Piper PA-24-250
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-24
- 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
- N5097P
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Cross Keys Airport (17N), Cross Keys, NJTo Hammonton Municipal Airport (N81), Hammonton, NJ
- 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 · VFR pattern base
- 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
- Accessory drive assembly, drive gear › Shifted
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane was on a base leg to the airport when the engine lost power, and the pilot performed a forced landing to a swampy area short of the runway. A subsequent examination of the engine revealed that within the accessory section, the idler gear assembly, which normally transferred power from the crankshaft to the left magneto and the camshaft, had been displaced. The mounting shaft had also been displaced, and the shaft hole was elongated. The upper portions of both shaft mounting plate retaining screws were missing. The lower screw appeared to be sheared, while the remnant of the upper screw exhibited mechanical damage. The crankcase surface area around the upper screw hole exhibited fretting, and the idler gear had missing and damaged gear teeth. Remnants of the shaft mounting plate retaining screws and screw lockplate were found in the bottom of the crankcase. The engine operating time was below the recommended time between overhaul (TBO). However, the manufacturer also recommended an overhaul if the TBO was not reached within the previous 12 years, and the accident engine had not been overhauled in over 30 years. The failure sequence could not be determined, and although an excessive amount of time had passed since the previous overhaul, the lack of an overhaul could not be correlated to the displacement of the idler gear assembly.
Probable cause
Displacement of the idler gear assembly, which resulted in a loss of camshaft timing, and a subsequent engine failure. Contributing to the accident was the swampy terrain condition.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC07LA001
- Event ID
- 20061213X01782
- Case number
- NYC07LA001
- 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: d3fc171772c8e8444b6ed6bd79d41445c99513717be117e1964eb255f48383fc; retrieved 2026-09-22T04:22:38.384Z.