CEN12LA299 · Piper PA-24-250
Piper PA-24-250 · Accident: loss of engine power (partial) while maneuvering
From Sundance Airpark (KHSD) to Shawnee Regional Airport (KSNL)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN12LA299
- 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-24-250
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-24
- 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
- N7171P
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Sundance Airpark (KHSD), Oklahoma City, OKTo Shawnee Regional Airport (KSNL), Shawnee, OK
- 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
- Maneuvering
- 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 as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot was conducting the second leg of the airplane’s first flight after a recent engine overhaul. On final approach, the pilot lowered the landing gear handle; however, he did not receive confirmation that the landing gear was down. The pilot stated that he applied a lot of force to conduct the manual gear override but that he was not able to get the handle up. Shortly thereafter, the engine lost power. The airplane was substantially damaged during the subsequent forced landing. A postaccident examination of the airplane revealed that the mixture cable was bent, the cable was pulled from its last clamp prior to the carburetor mixture control, and the mixture control was pulled into the cutoff position. The routing of the mixture cable did not match assembly drawings, and several clamps used to route the mixture cable were missing. A grease fitting on the over-center link for the nose landing gear was in line with the bend in the mixture cable. Most likely, the landing gear center link became entangled in the mixture control cable, which prevented the nose landing gear from extending. The mixture likely came to idle when the pilot used extra force to try to extend the landing gear. The mixture cable was not installed properly during the recent engine overhaul.
Probable cause
The improper installation of the mixture cable by maintenance personnel, which allowed the mixture cable to entangle with the landing gear during gear extension and led to the subsequent loss of engine power.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN12LA299
- Event ID
- 20120514X33812
- Case number
- CEN12LA299
- 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: 932eee0983e1d3116b8fd37ae69a4a42a9c2c977ff41c0c1a0e5949be9dacd7e; retrieved 2026-09-15T18:05:56.863Z.