Satsair Cirrus Design Corp SR22 incident
Cirrus Design Corp SR22 · Incident: loss of engine power (total) en route
From Page Field (FMY) to St. Petersburg Clearwater International Airport (PIE)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA09FA228
- 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
- Incident
- 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
Cirrus Design Corp SR22
- Aircraft type
- Cirrus SR22
- 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
- N509SR
- Operator
- Satsair
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Page Field (FMY), Fort Myers, FLTo St. Petersburg Clearwater International Airport (PIE), St. Petersburg, FL
- 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
- Loss of engine power (total)
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Minor
Cause areas
- Aircraft › Aircraft power plant
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
About 10 minutes after takeoff, when the airplane was in level cruise flight, the engine lost power. The pilot performed a forced landing to a road, which resulted in minor damage to the airplane when the right wing impacted a road sign. An initial examination of the engine revealed a hole in the upper deck in the vicinity of the Nos. 5 and 6 pistons. Further examination revealed that both of the No. 6 connecting rod bolts were fractured. One bolt was missing the self-locking nut, and fretting adjacent to the bolt hole on the split-line face of the connecting rod indicates that the bolt was probably not tightened with sufficient torque and backed off the bolt. The bolt then likely backed out of its hole on the connecting rod, enabling the cap to hinge open, and the loading of the other bolt in tension and bending to the point of overstress. The connecting rod then separated from the crankshaft and punched a hole in the crankcase.
Probable cause
Inadequate torque on one of the No. 6 connecting rod bolt retaining nuts, which resulted in the connecting rod’s separation from the crankshaft and a subsequent total loss of engine power.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA09FA228
- Event ID
- 20090403X22132
- Case number
- ERA09FA228
- 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: a642ebd942aeff830695eddfcab1edd13bb8f7ac95464f9b6e0a7f9d80496247; retrieved 2026-09-15T10:54:01.728Z.