ERA12FA084 · Cessna 177RG
Cessna 177RG · Accident: loss of engine power (total) en route
From Knoxville Downtown Island Airport (DKX) to Northwest Florida Beaches International Airport (ECP)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA12FA084
- 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
- 3 · 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 177RG
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 177
- 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
- N5AW
- Operator
- Woliver Kim A
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Knoxville Downtown Island Airport (DKX), Knoxville, TNTo Northwest Florida Beaches International Airport (ECP), Panama 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 (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
- Aircraft › Aircraft power plant
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airplane was in cruise flight at 4,000 feet when the pilot declared an emergency due to low engine oil pressure and requested radar vectors to the nearest airport. The pilot received radar vectors to fly direct to the nearest airport. Shortly thereafter, the pilot advised the air traffic controller that he was unable to reach the airport and was going to land in a field. According to a witness adjacent the field, the airplane flew at a low altitude over his home, and it made a sharp, banking turn in an attempt to land in the field. The airplane was unable to land in the clearing and collided with a tree line at the end of a field, and a postcrash fire ensued.
During the postaccident examination of the engine the left and right crankcase halves were found fractured between the No. 1 and No. 2 cylinder base pads. The No. 2 crankshaft journal was visible through the crankcase fracture, and no connecting rod was observed on the journal. Further examination of the No. 2 cylinder rod cap and the related bolt pieces revealed that the rod cap was fractured. Examination revealed that the bearing shells for the No. 3 and No. 4 cylinders displayed severe abrasive wear on the bearing surfaces. It is likely that due to the failure of the No. 2 rod end cap bolt, the rod end cap came loose, which resulted in a fracture of the case halves and subsequent loss of engine oil. After the loss of engine oil, the engine seized, which resulted in a total loss of engine power.
Probable cause
The failure of the No. 2 rod end cap bolt, which resulted in a total loss of engine power.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA12FA084
- Event ID
- 20111126X53102
- Case number
- ERA12FA084
- 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: c1e80db65b20fd78f1fd996cf1164cd05401e94a3d4e76d5c38c39d7ef4861bb; retrieved 2026-09-13T22:00:32.563Z.