ANC07LA088 · Piper J-3
Piper J-3 · Accident: total loss of engine power (non-mechanical) on approach
From Lake Hood Airport (Z41) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC07LA088
- 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 J-3
- Aircraft type
- Piper J-3
- 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
- N98875
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Lake Hood Airport (Z41), Anchorage, AKTo 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
- 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 (non-mechanical)
- 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(cfi) › Carburetor heat, delayed
- Pilot in command(cfi) › Supervision, inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The local instructional flight was on an extended, low power descending approach to a remote airstrip when the engine lost power. Remedial actions to restore engine power, including pulling the carburetor heat on, did not restore engine power. The flight instructor seated in the rear seat of the tandem, two seat airplane, realized the airplane was too low to reach the airstrip, and he took the controls from the front seat pilot. The instructor made an off-airport emergency landing in soft terrain, and the airplane nosed over. Postaccident inspection disclosed ample fuel and no preimpact mechanical problems. The front seat pilot related that he did not have the carburetor heat on until the loss of engine power occurred, and the instructor told him to turn it on. He also said that there were low, wispy clouds in the area. A local weather report indicated that the temperature was 57F, and the dew point was 52F. When these values are entered into a carburetor icing probability chart, the results are in the "Serious Icing" category. Carburetor ice likely formed inside the carburetor, which resulted in the loss of engine power. Carburetor heat becomes ineffective once the engine has lost power.
Probable cause
The flight instructor's delayed instructions to apply the carburetor heat, and his inadequate supervision. A factor contributing to the accident was carburetor icing conditions.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC07LA088
- Event ID
- 20070827X01243
- Case number
- ANC07LA088
- 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: 17dd7292fd2ed860f834613c55a46294f3d154a612466d86e0477342514e31de; retrieved 2026-09-22T03:30:38.023Z.