ERA09LA151 · Aeronca 7AC
Aeronca 7AC · Accident: loss of engine power (partial) en route
From Jim Hamilton L.B. Owens Airport (CUB) to Jim Hamilton L.B. Owens Airport (CUB)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA09LA151
- 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
Aeronca 7AC
- Aircraft type
- Aeronca 7
- 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
- N3066E
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Jim Hamilton L.B. Owens Airport (CUB), Columbia, SCTo Jim Hamilton L.B. Owens Airport (CUB), Columbia, SC
- 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
- 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
- Loss of engine power (partial)
- 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
- Not determined › Not determined
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot reported that he had been flying for about 1 hour, and was at an altitude of 800 feet mean sea level, when the engine began to run rough. The pilot elected to perform a precautionary off-airport landing to a nearby cotton field. During the subsequent landing roll, the airplane nosed over and sustained substantial damage to the firewall and vertical stabilizer. Examination of the engine, which included a test run, did not reveal any preimpact malfunctions. A weather observation taken at an airport located about 30 miles southeast of the accident site, about the time of the accident, included a temperature of 16 degrees Celsius (C) and a dew point of -4 degrees C. The pilot did not use the carburetor heat control after experiencing the engine roughness; however, atmospheric conditions at the time were not conducive to the formation of carburetor ice.
Probable cause
A loss of engine power for undetermined reasons.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA09LA151
- Event ID
- 20090202X04702
- Case number
- ERA09LA151
- 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. 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: 2648c33a12add47054c5f2e3101e8759eca7e842f0794b7d28fc3e29a4e0b091; retrieved 2026-09-15T10:43:33.649Z.