NYC08LA144 · Piper PA-34-200T
Piper PA-34-200T · Accident: fire/smoke (non-impact) while taxiing
From Covington, TN to Charles W. Baker Airport (2M8)
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC08LA144
- 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-34-200T
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-34
- 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
- N66AH
- Operator
- William A. McMahan · private individual
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Covington, TNTo Charles W. Baker Airport (2M8), Millington, TN
- 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
- Taxi · to runway
- Defining eventThe 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
- Fire/smoke (non-impact)
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Destroyed
Cause areas
- Not determined › Not determined
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
While practicing takeoffs and landings at night, the pilot departed his home base, landed at an intermediate airport, and then flew to a third airport. As the pilot taxied the airplane for the next departure, he saw a flicker of light in his peripheral vision, then looked aft, and saw a flame behind the aft cabin seats. He immediately shut down both engines and exited the airplane. He looked into the cabin through the aft-most, co-pilot side window and saw flames reaching up to about the bottom of the window. The airplane was subsequently consumed by the fire. Examination of the airplane's combustion-type heater, which was located in the area where the pilot reported seeing the fire, and which was operating at the time of the accident, revealed that it exhibited severe thermal damage throughout its entire assembly. None of the fire damage on the exterior of the heater could be identified as causal or associated with the initiation of a fire. The combustion heater was completely disassembled, and no point of origin for the fire was found. The airplane's maintenance records were onboard the airplane at the time of the fire, and were not recovered, therefore the maintenance history of the heater and its components could not be verified.
Probable cause
A fire of undetermined origin.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC08LA144
- Event ID
- 20080512X00652
- Case number
- NYC08LA144
- Dataset
- full-current
- Source SHA-256
- 5cf380f0061817c0331a6b2d8cc7e0ee3a79bea469a1001dc5c10e56f35f5ab3
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: local date, investigation status, coordinates. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2008-03-22.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 84a0b275776b1f6634349461be35cc9fb0a62909d9d7bef6c2376b03de74658d; retrieved 2026-09-15T09:38:41.813Z.