ERA11LA173 · Globe GC-1B
Globe GC-1B · Accident: loss of engine power (total) en route
From Wilmington International Airport (ILM) to Franklin County Airport (18A)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA11LA173
- 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
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
Globe GC-1B
- Aircraft type
- Globe GC-1
- 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
- N80741
- Operator
- Sigvaldsen Gary S
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Wilmington International Airport (ILM), Wilmington, NCTo Franklin County Airport (18A), Canon, GA
- 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
- Environmental issues › Conditions/weather/phenomena
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot reported that about 3 hours into his cross-country flight the engine began to surge and lose power. He initially thought it was carburetor ice and turned on the carburetor heat. The carburetor heat seemed to improve engine performance briefly, but the engine began to surge again and eventually stopped running. The pilot made an emergency forced landing in a field with the landing gear up and flaps down, incurring substantial damage to the underside of the airplane. A postaccident examination of the fuel system revealed no blockage or contamination of the fuel. According to the Federal Aviation Administration’s carburetor icing probability chart, the temperature/dew point combination at the time of the accident met the conditions favoring formation of serious carburetor icing at cruise power. It is likely that the loss of engine power resulted from carburetor icing.
Probable cause
The total loss of engine power due to the formation of carburetor ice.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA11LA173
- Event ID
- 20110302X01438
- Case number
- ERA11LA173
- 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: a529365aeee134134b244f8d3e8fe21a97b5c0ba78d3aeea3c51e9cfbc0ddb24; retrieved 2026-09-15T15:52:04.622Z.