ERA10LA187 · Cessna 152
Aero II Cessna 152 · Accident: loss of engine power (partial) en route
From Spartanburg Downtown Memorial Airport (SPA) to Spartanburg Downtown Memorial Airport (SPA)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA10LA187
- 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 152
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 152
- 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
- N93441
- Operator
- Aero II
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Spartanburg Downtown Memorial Airport (SPA), Spartanburg, SCTo Spartanburg Downtown Memorial Airport (SPA), Spartanburg, 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 · descent
- 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
- Aircraft › Aircraft power plant
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The local instructional flight had departed from the airport about 30 minutes prior to the accident. After completing several aerial maneuvers, including slow flight and power-off stalls, the student pilot had begun a recovery from another power-off stall. When he applied throttle, the engine immediately began to run rough. The certificated flight instructor decided to perform a forced landing in a farm field. During the landing roll, the nosewheel came in contact with the soft soil and the airplane nosed over. A postaccident examination of the engine by a Federal Aviation Administration inspector revealed that the bottom sparkplug and associated helicoil on the No. 4 cylinder had separated from the cylinder. After new sparkplug and helicoil was installed in the engine, it ran normally.
The airplane's engine maintenance logbook showed that four days prior to the accident, the bottom sparkplug and helicoil had been replaced on the No. 4 cylinder due to a bad helicoil. The mechanic had installed a standard helicoil contrary to the engine manufacturer's recommendation to install oversize helicoil spark plug inserts.
Probable cause
The certificated mechanic's improper installation of a helicoil, which resulted in the separation of a sparkplug and the helicoil and led to a partial loss of engine power.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA10LA187
- Event ID
- 20100324X51004
- Case number
- ERA10LA187
- 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: b34fc6dd82eecd24397310fd9e6d67e93e3880f23139577539e8b523d3cc7347; retrieved 2026-09-15T13:47:19.376Z.