ERA12LA410 · Piper J5A
Piper J5A · Accident: loss of engine power (total) en route
From Beverly Regional Airport (BVY) to Beverly Regional Airport (BVY)
Narrative check · The NTSB narrative appears to contradict this record's location. Values are shown as recorded, not corrected; compare with the narrative.
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA12LA410
- 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 J5A
- Aircraft type
- Piper J5
- 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
- N40985
- Operator
- Edward P. Bulger · private individual
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Beverly Regional Airport (BVY), Beverly, MATo Beverly Regional Airport (BVY), Beverly, MA
- 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
- 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
- Not determined › Not determined
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot filled the airplane’s fuel tanks before departing on the over-ocean aerial observation flight. About 5.8 hours into the flight, while the pilot was returning to the departure airport, the engine began losing power. The pilot attempted to restore engine power using carburetor heat and the engine primer but was unsuccessful, so he ditched the airplane in the ocean about 21 miles from the destination airport. The airplane subsequently sank and was not recovered; therefore, no postaccident examination of the engine or airframe could be conducted. Although no information was available regarding the dew point conditions near the accident site, according to a Federal Aviation Administration carburetor icing probability chart, the temperature and dew point at the destination airport were conducive to the formation of carburetor ice at cruise/glide power settings. Postaccident fuel consumption calculations based on information published by the engine manufacturer showed that the airplane had a potential fuel endurance of between 3.8 and 7.1 hours depending on power setting, with an average endurance of 4.8 hours. The pilot estimated that the airplane contained about 5 gallons of fuel when the engine lost power. Because the airplane sank, the investigation was not able to conclusively determine the reason for the loss of engine power.
Probable cause
A loss of engine power for reasons that could not be determined because the aircraft sank after ditching and was not recovered.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA12LA410
- Event ID
- 20120623X90739
- Case number
- ERA12LA410
- 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: 7ce94d6b854dab0ee95382f1c70248931d021db678e0b6d1af423cbcdb8f4232; retrieved 2026-09-15T18:36:21.729Z.