ERA09LA491 · Myers Donald E KITFOX 4
Myers Donald E KITFOX 4 · Accident: loss of engine power (total) en route
From Potomac Airpark (W35) to CBE · Cumberland, MD
Narrative check · The NTSB narrative appears to contradict this record's departure or destination. Values are shown as recorded, not corrected; compare with the narrative.
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA09LA491
- 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
Myers Donald E KITFOX 4
- Aircraft type
- Myers Donald KITFOX 4
- 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
- N69377
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route Narrative disagrees
- From Potomac Airpark (W35), Berkeley Springs, WVTo CBE · Cumberland, MD
- 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 (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
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot was flying at an altitude of 2,800 feet mean sea level when the engine of his homebuilt airplane abruptly lost power. After many failed attempts to restart the engine, the pilot landed in a wooded area. The airplane came to rest in a nose-low attitude suspended off the ground between two trees. The pilot sustained minor injuries and the airplane incurred substantial damage. An examination of the engine found evidence of inadequate lubrication to the engine’s rotary valve and foreign material and debris in both carburetors. During the examination, the rotary valve was only able to produce a few turns of the propeller before it stuck in a position that cut off the fuel/oil mixture’s flow to the cylinder. The rotary valve’s oil tank was empty and the pilot stated that he had never added any oil to it in the 49 hours the airplane was operated. Review of the engine’s operators and maintenance manuals revealed that the engine had been improperly stored for 18 years.
Probable cause
A total loss of engine power due to the lack of sufficient lubrication and the pilot/owner’s failure to adequately service the airplane’s engine.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA09LA491
- Event ID
- 20090830X54237
- Case number
- ERA09LA491
- 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: f524cfcc5fccd0967c095cf5b382332c0c6cf00577138b70922a547091886863; retrieved 2026-09-15T12:52:13.829Z.