ERA10LA487 · Navion NAVION G
Navion NAVION G · Accident: loss of engine power (partial) en route
From Evansville Regional Airport (EVV) to Cannon Creek Airpark (15FL)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA10LA487
- 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
Navion NAVION G
- Aircraft type
- Navion G
- 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
- N2448T
- Operator
- John B Gordon · private individual
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Evansville Regional Airport (EVV), Evansville, INTo Cannon Creek Airpark (15FL), Lake City, 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 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 › Fluids/miscellaneous hardware
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane was in cruise flight at 7,000 feet mean sea level, when the engine began to run rough and the oil pressure decreased. The pilot was unable to fly the airplane to the nearest airport and performed a forced landing to a field. During the landing, the airplane struck a ditch and came to rest upright, which resulted in substantial damage to the empennage.
An annual inspection was completed on the airplane about 5 months, or 25 flight hours, prior to the accident; however, the pilot had recently changed the engine oil himself. Initial examination of the engine revealed that the oil drain tube remained attached to the oil quick-release drain plug, and oil was leaking down the side of the oil drain tube likely as a result of the quick-release oil drain plug not being properly secured. A subsequent teardown examination of the engine revealed that the No. 5 connecting rod failed due to lack of lubrication.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to properly secure the oil drain plug after changing the engine oil, which resulted in oil starvation and an engine failure during cruise flight.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA10LA487
- Event ID
- 20100919X65029
- Case number
- ERA10LA487
- 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: db4370bf1641d3112f6856d91939ab2717b21bc6f644f51c8dbff2d02e32b09d; retrieved 2026-09-15T15:16:17.074Z.