Spirit Flight Cessna TR182 accident
Cessna TR182 · Accident: powerplant system/component malfunction/failure en route
From Roberts Field (RDM) to Prineville, OR
Event
- NTSB case
- SEA08LA156
- 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
- Charter & commuter
- 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 TR182
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 182
- 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
- N7XZ
- Operator
- Spirit Flight
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Roberts Field (RDM), Redmond, ORTo Prineville, OR
- 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 135: Air Taxi & Commuter
- 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
- En route · cruise
- 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
- Powerplant system/component malfunction/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
- Aircraft › Aircraft power plant
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot reported that, during cruise flight, the engine began to run rough as she noticed that the propeller rpm was beyond the red line indication and that oil was coming from the forward cowling area behind the propeller. The oil began coating the windscreen and made forward visibility nearly impossible as the pilot initiated an off-airport landing in an adjacent open field. During the landing roll, the airplane struck a barbed wire fence and came to rest on a two-lane highway, which resulted in substantial damage to the right wing and engine firewall. A postaccident examination of the engine revealed that the crankshaft was cracked about 380 to 400 degrees around the circumference of the forward bearing journal, originating from the oil-through hole and progressing in a direction opposite of the rotation of the crankshaft. A metallurgical examination of the fracture region revealed that the origin of the fracture was consistent with a brittle intergranular fracture through the nitride layer and exhibited numerous crack arrest marks. Beyond the fatigue fracture area, the fracture was on a slant plane consistent with overstress separation. The source of the loading that lead to the initial crack formation at the oil through-hole could not be determined. Review of aircraft logbook records revealed that an engine overhaul was completed on May 1, 2006. The most recent annual inspection of the engine and airframe was conducted on May 30, 2008, 252.3 hours since the engine's last major overhaul.
Probable cause
The failure of the crankshaft during cruise flight due to fatigue.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record SEA08LA156
- Event ID
- 20080701X00960
- Case number
- SEA08LA156
- 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: 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: e6e8c8a09f1233e2089310c2c2a68269b833b54c6d69d53402598a225b6c9a73; retrieved 2026-09-15T09:50:45.237Z.