ERA09LA481 · Cessna 172RG
Air Fleet Training Systems Cessna 172RG · Accident: loss of engine power (total) en route
From Greenwood Lake Airport (4N1) to Essex County Airport (CDW)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA09LA481
- 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
Cessna 172RG
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 172
- 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
- N6117R
- Operator
- Air Fleet Training Systems
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Greenwood Lake Airport (4N1), Milford, NJTo Essex County Airport (CDW), Caldwell, NJ
- 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
- 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
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Aircraft › Aircraft power plant
- Aircraft › Fluids/miscellaneous hardware
- Not determined › Not determined
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The certificated flight instructor (CFI) and dual/student pilot were practicing maneuvers when the CFI noticed that the left main gear of the airplane was wet. As he looked for the source of the substance he noticed that the airplane’s oil pressure was critically low and immediately headed back to the airplane’s base. On the way, the engine came “to a halt with the propeller stopping” and the CFI elected to land in an empty section of a mall parking lot. The airplane’s nose landing gear contacted a curb and the right wing impacted a tree before coming to a stop. An examination of the wreckage revealed the fluid on the wheel to be oil leaking from the engine, which covered the bottom and empennage section of the airplane. A teardown examination of the engine found the No. 3 and No. 4 pistons with damage consistent with overheating and oil starvation. The lower portion of the No. 3 piston was destroyed. There was no internal or external evidence with the engine to account for the oil leak. The engine oil system was examined and found to be unremarkable. The CFI stated that a quart of oil was added, for a total 6.7 quarts of oil in the engine, prior to the accident flight.
Probable cause
A total loss of engine power due to oil starvation for undetermined reasons.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA09LA481
- Event ID
- 20090825X60337
- Case number
- ERA09LA481
- 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: ee9629cfa04947d535bff319c3ffa6d0754b293a714fba474ec9f401f83b0b8c; retrieved 2026-09-15T12:50:32.085Z.