ERA10LA306 · Piper PA-28-180
Piper PA-28-180 · Accident: loss of engine power (partial) en route
From 4R4 · Fairhope, AL to Hattiesburg Laurel Regional Airport (PIB)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA10LA306
- 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
Piper PA-28-180
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-28
- 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
- N5118L
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From 4R4 · Fairhope, ALTo Hattiesburg Laurel Regional Airport (PIB), Hattiesburg, MS
- 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
- Aircraft › Aircraft power plant
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
About 20 minutes after takeoff, the pilot heard a "pop" that sounded as if it came from the engine compartment. The engine then experienced a loss of power and the pilot elected to perform a forced landing to a field, during which the airplane nosed over. A postaccident examination of the engine revealed that the No. 3 cylinder had partially separated from the engine case. Additionally, the attaching hardware was loose and the thru-bolts were broken. The cylinder had been replaced 16 flight hours prior to the accident.
Probable cause
The partial separation of the No. 3 cylinder due to improper torquing of the cylinder hold-down bolts by maintenance personnel during installation of the cylinder.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA10LA306
- Event ID
- 20100609X10621
- Case number
- ERA10LA306
- 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: 7e7e33948b5f7cabe998de8ea57b9117ada9099e73439f706a7560163b2d4bbd; retrieved 2026-09-15T14:25:32.116Z.